Grafting-on to God

Sometimes I've known a person, let's say a woman who was wronged by a man, who was so hurt by the experience that de-facto all men became bad. Evil macho abusers who lived solely to Keep Women Down, unless of course they were white men, in which case they are additionally guilty by race-proxy of approximately every crime of mankind toward one another since the dawn of time. (I should call it the President Syndrome: like whoever is sitting in the Big Chair at any given moment, they are considered daily freshly-guilty of voodoo baby eating, impending environmental annihilation and the wanton destruction of mankind -- and all this before 9am each morning.)

Humans tend to generalize, which itself is not bad, unless applied as a limiting stereotype, which can be. In the case of people who've been hurt by something, this tendency seems more common.

So for example, while not all former czech, long-haired canadian linux nuts are exasperating, the fact that my ex fits that description means that every other man who might is probably not going to get a fair deal from me. I recognize this. Like some kind of Pavlovian Romance Syndrome, it'll never be otherwise, c'est la vie.

Church and Hypocrisy

Back in the days when I sometimes attended church, one of the things I found interesting--because of my general sociology and psychology interests--was how people tend to "blur" the actual issues of church itself (the human social construct) and God (the divine energy with which some people have a 'relationship').

For example, people who had left the church, would sometimes say something to me like, "Well yes, that is because the people there are such hypocrites!" (This should be a given, since at least some people everywhere tend to be; why should church be any different.) But on talking with them, what became clear was that they had not actually just left attending church. Their prayer, their reading, their focus in general related to God, had usually also vanished or nearly so.

The irony here is that the relationship with God is for them, and for God; it has nothing to do with what some other person(s) at church are like. But they grafted on to God their disgust at the social situation.

Religion vs. Spiritual, and 'Agnostics'

Now most people will say--in today's world this is becoming almost a stock answer--"I'm not religious, but I consider myself spiritual." If the person actually IS spiritual; if they spend as much attention or focus, prayer or whatever, on the subject of the divine when on their own (or more) than when in church, then that makes sense.

But many of the people I've known to say this, it's kind of an evasion. Much like 'agnostic', which technically only describes a person who 'doesn't know whether there is a God or not', usually that's not so much an issue of indecision as an issue of not giving a damn either way. As a former agnostic who cared, I see the difference.

And as someone who no longer goes to church--because none of them around me support my personal theology--but who spends a decent amount of time praying and thinking about such things, I see the difference.

All of this is only prep material for the actual point though, which is this: the behavior of people in a church has nothing to do with God.

Remote Viewing Had To Be In Here Somewhere, Of Course

This is typical... and human. For example, I've seen plenty of people too disgusted by the online remote viewing field's issues to bother viewing, because their emotional turn-off simply carried over into the entire subject. I'm sure this can be applied to nearly any topic or issue.

But now getting back to the subject...

Church as a Governmental Construct

Historically, The Church (note the capitals) has had and been a problem in several key ways. Not counting the minor detail of going forth and killing people in the name of love and forgiveness (...), there's a whole lot of financial, political, social, personal and other power-trips involved in the 'structure' of ANY church--which is, at base, a "socio-spiritual governmental construct"--enough of it to make this history and this tendency difficult for some people to overlook or forgive.

The Church--and most every church--has also done an untold amount of good, of course. But the zillions of good works done by individuals, no matter how much more prevalent if sheer numbers are what counts, are generally personal-sized moments of compassion and assistance. For sheer media and enduring legacy, it's hard to compete with the global-sized screwups that "leaders" of ANY governmental-construct can pull off.

As most of this has been made possible in part by the creative theocracy of doctrine and dogma, it goes without saying that all of that is colored by the same emotion.

As a result of Church being, by nature, a governmental-construct, and as a result of its least charming qualities being its most famous stereotypes, and as a result of various doctrines and dogmas supporting both of those, over time I've met more and more people who range from disinterested in religion to fervently against it.

I know people who almost rabidly hate the church, sometimes any church, and by extension, everything about the doctrines that the church(es) hold dear.

Theological Identities - Mine

One of the most mind-crunching things about genuine spiritual experience is that it often has the inconsiderate problem of not fitting into any of the pre-made boxes our culture has designed for it. If it did, my experiences would be things like, say, being of white light, with wings, sitting on clouds, playing harps, and spouting Official Doctrine.

The closest I've come to light beings appeared to be aliens.

The closest I've come to an angel was my blue eyes of soul/faith experience. The only ref I find to this in literature is in occult works, following an Abyss experience (which I also had, appears to be archetypal), in some works it's called the Holy Guardian Angel.

A number of seemingly spiritual identities--or some which had such profound physical and emotional effects I considered them spiritual, one I wondered if it was Archangel Michael--look just like one of the main identities of my 'four elementals of soul'... which also look like The Nordics (alleged aliens)... ok, let's just go with saying this is, at best, a confusing experience-set.

And then there's the creatures, both the little ones and the 'helpers', like I talked about in The Dark and Fiery Coup. And then there's the (demon-like?) creature I talked about in The Immortal. And then... well you know, I could go on for hours, even with the maybe 5% of my experiences I actually have written down and posted somewhere on the internet, which involved other identities.

I onced merged with the number four. It was sex of the spirit. To say this was 'abstract yet fundamental' would be the understatement of the century; I don't begin to have words to describe it. Also, I once slightly merged psychically with a metal recycling bin. Who needs drugs? So even outside the things we assume are merely 'spiritual' -- and this is only because "we can't see them," since if we could SEE the identities we consider spiritual, we'd probably consider them something else, when you think about it -- it is all a bigger cast of characters than most would imagine.

The cosmology of critters, whether demonic or divine, whether local spiritual homeboys or foreign aliens or "inorganics" as Casteneda called one grouping, is very big, and very confusing. Some religions simplify this: everything is Jesus, or it's evil. End of story. I can't really deal with that kind of polarity though. So I'm left simply accepting that there's a long list of stuff that is pretty confusing and I have no real idea what it is, or what it means.

Sometimes I find myself 'tempted' by cat-eyed lizard guy type of aliens (as I think of them, maybe they're entities, who the hell knows?) and usually find myself standing feet planted, legs apart like a sailor, chanting loudly, "I am of Michael!" at them. I always figured this meant Archangel Michael since I've always been drawn to him and used to be a total nut about him, chanting nightly and praying intently and so on. But it turns out that in the Urantia book, Jesus is actually assumed to be an identity which, prior to the whole dwelling in a body thing (and we see how well THAT worked out for him, according to legend anyway...), was allegedly named Michael. Seriously. So there are people who call Jesus Michael. But wait... it turns out the word 'Jesus' is like, the Greek translation of Yeshua, which is actually Joshua -- so some people call Jesus Joshua. Is anybody else confused yet... I suppose you might say as long as they're talking to him, HE probably doesn't have an identity crisis, and psi "intent" being what it is, one assumes their prayers are reaching the right divine post office box.

I really don't know what I'm talking about in all those dreams and OBEs where I find myself yelling that. To me at the time it's simply an overpowering "devoted to / respect for / disciple of" sort of feeling. If it turns out there are 1001 spiritual entities called "Michael," I'd be hard pressed to know exactly which one I was talking about. Michael just seems like THE ultimate authority when I find myself in that state of mind; it doesn't really feel like I'm referring to one of a zillion guys who live on the hill, because rather it's more like, the name feels as penultimately-singular as the word "God".

Mary and Jesus

Now, I once had an experience where I 'met' Mary. As in, the mother of Jesus. And I once had an experience where I 'met' Jesus. Now this would be all well and fine, with a couple of small details, being that:

a) I am not a Christian, and

b) I didn't even believe in Mary as anything more than some woman who had Jesus (I wasn't raised catholic, so had no affiliation with her at all), and

c) In all my years as a christian, I prayed fiercely, constantly, to "better understand the jesus thing," only to finally realize that for years the answer had been, "a holy man, but not at all what the construct of religion has made him out to be." So I didn't really even buy the standard theology about him, which was complicated by:

d) I think there is sufficient archeo-/anthropo-logical evidence, as well as viewing work (not official RV since there's no hard feedback), to suggest that the human Jesus didn't actually die on the cross and he and his mom lived out the rest of their lives quite happily in another city and were buried in crypts still considered in that region to belong to them.

So let's recap: No christianity, no Mary, no belief in Jesus as more than a holy man, and no belief he died on the cross "and was resurrected"--that has to be the important part, since everybody dies, obviously!--suffice to say that my belief systems simply DO NOT SUPPORT the standard theology of Christianity.

But I met Jesus, and Mary, in spiritual experiences, and they are the most mind-blowing, powerful, real experiences imaginable. They literally shifted my perspective overnight. I can't even just say I respect them, only "such a degree of AWE it approaches healthy fear, yet understanding of innate goodness that is nothing to fear" starts on describing it.

So if Jesus wasn't the guy that official theology packages him as--and I do not believe he was--then who did I meet? How did I 'know' it was 'Jesus' at the time? And the same question goes for Mary. Some might say, "Well obviously he was, your experience proves that," but to that I would say, "If praying fiercely for years and getting a pretty clear and ever-stronger intuitive answer doesn't mean anything, then this is all pointless anyway." In my view, the only dichotomy is that the answer I got wasn't what I suspected, and doesn't support the power politic of our culture. And that would be all fine if it weren't for the dilemma that DESPITE this, I still managed to encounter both of those identities, spiritually.

My friend ML has a theory about this. She believes that although they began as individuals, that gradually the hundreds, thousands, millions, by now billions, of people devotedly praying to them, crying to them, pouring massive energy their whole lives into them, have created thought forms that are more real than real--literally, they are alive and powerful in a way that goes way beyond anything we as humans can currently understand. This is to say, that these identities are "based on" the original identities, but are vastly more than that, both in complexity and in power. They are divine and powerful and even godlike in a fashion, but they are not merely "the soul of the dead humans" we knew on earth.

So far, this is about the best framework I can use for the subject. I know that the Jesus and Mary I met 'spiritually' are real; I believe that the Jesus and Mary who lived on our planet were regular, if highly spiritual, people; but I am not 100% certain what these two seemingly distinct yet intertwined aspects of each identity have to do with each other.

It is, much like the aliens vs. entities dilemma, mostly just "damn confusing."

Theological Identities - In General

Now one of the things I notice about how people around me deal with religion, goes back to the start of this essay, and the issue with projecting feelings about church onto God. Since most of my friends tend to be brainiacs, it's not surprising that they've already done plenty of thinking-outside-the-cross about religion. (Yes, I might burn in hell for coming up with that pun.)

One thing I note is how many of them dislike, if not actually "rabidly despise", organized religion, The Church or any church, etc. They point out, and usually rightly, the number of problems with the doctrine and history and likely legitimacy of plenty of the dogma that is used to 'support' the worship or relationship with these identities.

What I see but can't understand though, is why they have forcibly "grafted-on to God" their issues with the human socio-governmental construct of church. Yes, I can agree that the crusades sucked, that half the OT is originally Sumerian, that most the 'divine workings' in the OT are probably basic science people forced into the framework of a divine hand (and in some unexplained-so-far cases, possibly technology more mundane than divine), but that is all about the church, the doctrine -- the human constructs, in other words.

It is not about God, or Jesus, or Mary, or Archangel Michael. All the resentment and disparaging cynical opinions thrown at these identities come from issues related to church or humans -- NOT issues related to THEM.

In my own experience, these things exist as surely as my car and my computer, but less physically--although even more intensively on the occasion when I bother feeling connected. I don't have any issue with them as spiritual identities. I believe in them completely and I have absolute faith in their divinity and goodness and all that kind of thing.

But if I say this publicly, people assume -- whether they are religious or anti-religious -- that I am obviously accepting of all the constructs of formal theology, or I wouldn't believe in them. That if I talk to Jesus or Michael or God or Mary or whatever, that I have "bought into" the tenets of organized religion, and a couple thousand years (or more) of stupidity that to a great degree comes with that doctrine. In other words, that I am "religious".

Even some intelligent people don't seem like they are able to intellectually (let alone experientially) grasp that Jesus-Mary-Michael-God as divine identities, or personal experiences, are completely unrelated to -- or at the least, "not constricted by" -- the theological framework that The Church puts them into. They figure that the identities don't exist. Or, that they do, but they suck as much as the church does.

It is a shame, because I know how powerful and divine these identities are, and I believe that a "relationship with them" would greatly improve any person, kind of like how having a truly awesome role-model and insightful friend does, times about a billion. But they are unable to allow themselves such a thing, because their intellectual side is so busy kicking the tires of the human construct of church and its dogmatic BS, that their intuitive side is unable to allow the relationships that would truly feed their soul.

They make the divine identities in theology the "representatives" for everything the humans do. Ironically, dying-for-human-sins-when-innocent is the very model of the jesus legend [and many prior], and in a reputational fashion, you might say this continues to happen daily.

They have, in short, grafted-on to god all their problems with humans. It's understandable, but I respect people who don't want to be limited by biases that our culture gives us -- whether it teaches us those, or whether we develop those biases through our rejection of what it teaches as an alternative, are no different. Either way, it is still a sort of unthinking bias that has us living our spirituality by default, or ignorance, or don't-give-a-damn-ness, rather than a genuine, truth-seeking intuitive awareness.

Experience with Divine Entities

The issues with people's comprehension of the difference between genuinely spiritual, vs. religious, makes it difficult for me to talk about some of my experiences, because I know they're going to be wildly "interpreted" by people with so many pre-existing belief systems.

It's like knowing that if you post the color blue, it's going to look red to some, purple to others, and black to still others, which makes the idea of posting blue seem rather pointless, if you see what I mean.

So I'm taking the trouble to write this down and mention something about my "spiritual relationship" with "divine entities" because it ought to be mentioned. I don't talk about it much because I feel like it'd just be misinterpreted anyway. But I feel it would be dishonest to not mention it ENTIRELY, as if it didn't exist, when in fact these entities play powerful roles in my inner life. Not as often as they should but that is my doing, not theirs. They have always--always without exception--been present and helpful when called.

When I said in a previous post that the characters on the TV show 'Supernatural' had 'the spiritual depth of Doritos' it's because I've been involved in enough powerful experiences, both good and bad, both with others and alone, to have some very strong feelings about the absolute necessity of an intensely personal relationship with God, or what one perceives to be God or some Aspect of it. What people choose to call it, and how they model it--as 'higher self' or 'holy guardian angel' or 'god on a cloud', is beside the point. The "spiritual technology" is via "personal relationship". How any person chooses to frame or model that relationship is entirely up to them. If they consider some part of their soul linked to something divine and they relate to that by imagining absorbing a red triangle, then hey, more power to 'em, whatever works. The point is the 'relationship'.

Anything that portrays people working with ANY kind of "powerful identities" and does not include that "relationship with the divine" element, is profoundly miseducating the world. I feel I can assure you that anybody who walks into serious ceremonial magick, or serious spiritual warfare in a christian sense, without a profound connection to self-via-God, is going to be someone's lunch. On the outside, they'll still look like the person you knew, but on the inside, their energy will basically be feeding other intents, and their walking personality will become a shell of what its true potential is. (Then again, since so much of our culture seem to be pretty shallow anyway, it's not like most people would notice.)

My Divine

Jesus as a spiritual, divine entity, is real. Unimaginably powerful. Love so pure it's like nothing else.

Mary as a spiritual, divine entity, is real. Unimaginably powerful. In my experience, though I'm sure the possibilities are endless, she was more like a strong protective mother, not the sweet innocent virginal sort; more 'mama bear' in spirit form.

Michael, as a spiritual, divine entity, is real. Unimaginably powerful. In my experience, a hard focus for the typically associated blue-ray things (honor, discipline, protection, and especially "faith"), with a curious tendency, whenever I get too "into" him, to literally pick up my attention and move it back to 'God', as if he feels I'm worshipping him and that's inappropriate.

And God, of course, as something we really don't have any good words for, is real. That oughtta be a no-brainer. I once spent a year as an Atheist. I thought. Every day, I ended up apologizing to God for not believing in him. I finally realized I was doing this, had a good laugh at myself, and realized that God is so innately a part of me that no amount of conscious denial, based on intellectually wanting to be 'cool' enough to disbelieve solely because religion is stupid and my ego doesn't want to be seen as stupid by other ego-centric intellectuals (...) was going to do anything about but inhibit me.

Now whether every person is capable of experiencing such things, I don't know. It's possible that genetics, and even natural intuition, might have something to do with how we physically, mentally, emotionally, psychologically, process the "God" or "divine entity" experience. And it's obvious to me at least, that a lot of people's spiritual experience is hugely inhibited by their prejudices -- either for a given religious framework, or against religion altogether.

I suspect that less grafting-on to God of personal bias, might allow more intuitive-experience of the divine, in ways, and forms, and identities, and situations, which are deeply impactive, but might not fit in the easy categories we expect.

I like the phrase from the movie The Fifth Element, "I serve life." I consider Archangel Michael my primary model. My internal metaphysics are fairly consistent but outside that realm, inexplicable and often confusing. They start with an Inner Guide sort of model, but are strongly grounded in something with multiple aspects... I have not been nearly as good at interaction as I should be, but now that I'm going to have some more time in my life, I hope to resolve that.

But my relationship with the divine includes such religious entities as Mary and Jesus as well. That I am not a christian, that I don't even believe 99.9% of christian theology (to include a good deal of hebrew stuff), is beside the point. I'm capable of interacting with the identities without needing them to be a given thing (or not) based on what folly humans have built around them. They exist, totally apart from the whole religion thing.

In case anybody else ever got the idea that even IF they felt the need to disregard the human religion stuff, they could still be OPEN to spiritual interaction with divine identities related to that religion, I thought I should have at least one post supporting the idea.

PJ

Russell Targ

Russell has a new book coming out. Headsup for those into his stuff.

http://www.espresearch.com/blindbiker/

Were-World

So for a week I was intensively writing... I'll get back to that shortly, soon as I get off work. It's typical paranormal fiction. Were creatures and so on. And then the last three days I watched some TV shows on amazon unbox -- three episodes of "New Amsterdam," about a soldier in the 1700s made semi-immortal by a native cure, and half a dozen episodes each last night and the night before of "Moonlight," about a young (90) vampire with O The Drama angst and his (of course) hot human sidekick. This is about ten days--well, nights and weekends--of being almost entirely obsessed with creatures that do not exist.

We assume.

It occurs to me that humans, despite that I'm one of them so I wish I were more optimistic about the lot, are unusually oblivious to the world around them. I've forgotten--and watched people forget--uncomfortable experiences within seconds. I've had experiences in full-on "3D and Dolby Sound" that I wrote off as either imagination or 'a dream' instantly because they didn't seem to fit into The World According To Consensus Reality. I've disbelieved accounts from people I would trust to tell me anything with truth, simply because I couldn't wrap my brain around it. I've watched people with lots of psychic experience be unable to accept someone else's because it was a little different. Our minds are Samsonite.

I met a man in person once who was a christian mystic. Unlike the image that brings to mind, of some gentle monk-like fellow, he was pretty different. He was as hard core metaphysical as anyone comes. I don't know how he made those puzzle pieces fit with christianity without running into contradiction in a few pretty major places, but apparently he did. He told me stories, later, of "interactions" let's just call them, with people he considered variant forms of witches and evil. Normally I would have tried not to laugh, but somehow coming from this guy, it seemed completely probable while he was telling it. He certainly had some kind of light in his eyes and intense energy. As a woman, this did little but lead me to a long list of pointedly unchristian ideas about what to do with him. Alas, he moved out of my reality too soon, leaving only the anomaly of my inability to remember his name, which was weird then and weird now.

There's a TV show I've watched on unbox called "Supernatural" which reminds me very slightly of his stories, except the show has a lot of over-violence and horror-gore by my standards; I always regret money spent on it, despite I love the actors and think the premise is good. The show is surreally missing the most important, central point of a true hunter: a relationship with God. Nobody seems to notice the guys on the TV show have the spiritual depth of Doritos. They never pray. They just go around killing people. But it's "all for the good of man" of course.

I can see why the producers would fear the spiritual angle but really, why hunt spiritual entities if you aren't spiritual? If only good and evil were always as black and white as the show makes it seem, rather than infinite shades of blended grey, like some tabby cat of the soul. Stomping out evil always seems easier when you can project it on some specific 'thing' and before you know it, 13 million people are dead allegedly "for the good of man," I suppose. And the heroes do an awful lot of selling their soul to a demon in order to save the life of someone else; as if a true belief in God would see death as so horrible, and as if any true hunter would go consorting with demons for anything at all. It promotes the mythology that they would keep their word, to start with, probably the most dangerous concept on the show.

I once met someone online who told me their father was a vampire hunter. I don't know if that's really so. He seemed a nice enough guy, a bit out there for me, but then again, I've always had the problem that my inner life is more out there than half the extremes, but my outer life is in here with logic and practicality. It looks good on the surface ("All that, yet she's still sane!"), but probably only tears me up in the middle where those opposite parts of me can't seem to mesh. But I digress. I was going to say, this leads me back to the idea I started this post with:

How much around us, do we not see?

UFOs and 'their inhabitants' have been reported since pretty much forever. From every corner of the earth. From multiple witnesses. From impeccable witnesses. Hell, one UFO sighting resulted in like a million people, over a dozen video tapes and of course much camera evidence for which we're supposed to conclude 'mass hallucination'. Because you know, camcorders hallucinate too. Despite you'd have to go into John Lilly lalaland of Vitamin K and the Stainless Steel Entities to try and make any case for that, this is apparently the conclusion of Reasonable Men(tm).

Allegedly 10% of the population is homosexual. (So to steal the joke about insanity, think of 9 friends; if it isn't them, it's you.) And yet, unless you're in California or Germany/Sweden it is highly unlikely that more than the tiniest fractional percentage of those are known to all around them in that respect. If we can't even deal with what's around us in perfectly ordinary ways like that, how do we expect to see "supernatural creatures", from the fae to the were to the undead to aliens to whatever else fiction writers hypothesize about, even if it does exist? They'd surely have strenuous measures in place to prevent and deal with exposure, and possibly talents that helped maintain the mystery.

I mean think about it. Allegedly, the reason 'werewolves' came into our cultural mythos is because they would freak out and kill people and they looked like, well, a werewolf. But if in reality they looked more like an ordinary wolf, and if management of the subculture was better so people were not being turned and freaking out daily, if they were capable of not killing, or even not turning, and of killing animals instead, and so forth -- these are the nouveau-fictions that modern writers insert to make the creatures into reasonable and sexy characters rather than monsters -- then there might not be any reason for people to notice them. Add a little mafia-style damage control, and basic human resistance to and denial of anything that frightens them anyway, and it's done.

There might be zero evidence for such things being real. I have not seen any. Ever. I've experienced things that give me opinions about a lot of other stuff, but zero about "alternative creatures", outside of the distinctly paranormal fae-type accounts (and not the kinder-gentler ones either) of a few friends. But my original "argument" with myself, that "it couldn't be real or we would know about it by now," is fundamentally flawed. That's the were variant of the "why aren't UFOs on the White House lawn" argument.

Reality itself seems a lot less... consistent and objective, the more I view and the older I get. Why do viewers I've observed task everything from known-fiction to aliens, but nobody tasks something like vampires and werewolves? I'm simply curious is all, as to why both legend and fiction are so often tasked (out of protocol obviously, for fun) but these, I've never seen done. I know it's far out--so are aliens, entities, Adam and Eve, and even "StarGate's Biggest Secret", all of which are not that unusual as targets in the field already. There's no less feedback on the worlds of fae or were than on anything else esoteric. Just fewer cultural constructs to support how people think about it.

Intuitive Writing and Speaking

Back in my Bewilderness days, I used to write a lot, emails and typed letters to friends. I would talk about my ideas and theories, a lot of metaphysical stuff. And once in awhile, it would shift into something more 'intuitive' than 'intellectual'.

There are several side effects or concomitant feelings during the time this happens. They don't all happen at once. But at least one is usually present when the writing is what I call intuitive--what others have called "inspired".

1. It feels like it is coming "through" you rather than "from" you. You could call this channeling and some do, but 'information' or 'energy' rather than an 'identity'. (I could argue that identity, information and energy are all the same thing from different perspectives, but not right now.)

2. There is an ineffable feeling of truth with it.

3. Sometimes only one word can have this! Or half a sentence. Or 3.5 sentences out of a paragraph. It is like energy wending through the language--it doesn't necessarily match the phrasing.

4. It is not much different with writing than speaking it.

5. Sometimes an internal gut-level "need" for a feeling of "sound that creates shape" is present. As if sound--even in written words!, but this is much more present with spoken words--actually IS some kind of geometric form, from another perspective.

6. There are side-effects of #5. For example, I would find myself using 3, or 30, or 300, words to say something that I actually have said with about 6 perfectly clearly, but the problem is, it didn't FEEL right. It felt like the "meaning-shape" that English words created was mismatched; the surface intellectual meaning, did not match the literal "shape of truth" that was the words. This could result in whole paragraphs sort of 'getting around to' saying something. I felt on some occasions that I understood why often, metaphysical books seemed like they had too many words, and didn't just say things succinctly. I felt they were facing the same problem--the energy of the 'truth-in-sound' not match the surface-meaning of english words, and so they were trying to pull in enough combination of shape to eventually have at least a fairly decent match.

7. Another side effect was a sometimes overwhelming need to express a certain feeling of shape in sound. I had the sense that one of these shapes was rather like a corner, or an "L" shape. Except that my language has no sound which actually matches this. The closest thing I could find was "K" -- the hard consonant aspect of it -- but that wasn't really right either. Sometimes I had such an overwhelming NEED to EXPRESS that energy that I would find myself quietly saying, "K! Kuh! KKKKKKKKKK!" -- this could happen even when typing something, bizarrely enough. I later talked with a man who'd worked in a mental hospital who told me that he'd encountered severe schizophrenics who had symptoms like that, who would make up stupid phrases that had "Hard consonants" in them (one example he gave was 'f--k a pig!') and say it over and over until they were screaming it. That is really pretty weird. I don't know if it's related but as I think a lot of "mental illness" may be the combination of genuine physical and mental problems mixed with psychic awareness highly distorted, I found that sort of interesting.

8. If in the same state of mind, I sometimes got an intuitive "thread" as I call it about OTHER people's words or writing. For example if I am looking at a paragraph of text, I have sometimes been able to 'feel'--in the same way--that a given word or piece of text, sentence or paragraph, has 'truth' in it. I could feel when it was cold and out of place as if a word had been inserted by someone else or after the fact. I could feel when the 'thread of truth' weakened and vanished. I could feel that sometimes things seemed 'mixed up' as if the sentence had been written with intuitive-truth but then the words had been rearranged.

9. There is this toy, it is a ball-like shape made of a zillion little rubber things. It is like a 'pompon' shape made of something akin to straight rubber band things. They all gather in the middle. I often had the sense that I was in the middle of a shape sort of like that, like I was in the center, and going out from me in every possible direction, was a tiny stream of energy. And I could shift my attention just slightly and I would have a different stream. This reminds me of channeler Jane Roberts, who referred to this feeling as being on a road with many "paths" and being able to choose different ones.

10. Once I had a 'stream of energy' running 'through' me that had 'information', I had to be very careful about the focus. If I had a question, an intent, and got information, it was important that I kind of "got out of the way of it." If I even paid attention to what was coming through as I communicated it, I would become interested in it, or wonder about some part of it. The instant I had that interest, it was as if I slightly changed the direction of the stream, and so the information would move with me. This could result in a rather odd constant shifting of the information's goal of explanation, rather than an essay on a single given topic. I have never shifted OUT of body to allow another identity (to my knowledge), but I assume that would solve the problem. I'm not real fond of that idea personally. I have enough issues with identity and accidental "merge" with others (people, planets, metal recycling bins...) without deliberately inviting that.

11. I have sometimes had this in remote viewing sessions. But it can be only pieces, like for example I can write down a sentence about something and feel that "the last half of that was intuitive."

I was telling a friend about this the other night and I wondered if I had ever written this down. So I just thought I would, before I forget it.

PJ

Wonder Land

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 26 December 2007

After literally going longer without even *thinking* about Remote Viewing than I have in many eons, I woke up one morning recently with a radical attitude adjustment.

I realized, suddenly, that I don't know anything about it.

I don't mean the subject, the protocol, or 47 other aspects we could wax on about. I mean actually DOING IT. Sure, I can do it technically. I could teach a few formal methods, I've developed a couple fairly unique approaches myself, and there's the 2.7 million variants on "just do it" as well.

What I mean is, I think that every thing I think about RV is a belief system.

A filter I've been too close to see.

An assumption I've been too close to question.

I think the mind automatically tries to backtrack from every observation and experience and come up with a 'why'.

I suddenly felt that everything I THINK I know about performing remote viewing is, in fact, an albatross to the process of actually doing it.

I had the feeling, all the sudden, that viewing sometimes went well despite me, not because of me.

***

My goal for 2008 with viewing is to start over. To pretend I know zero about the doing-it-part, and just let every session be anything it wants to be, without models and structures.

To be as spontaneous as humanly possible.

To put no judgement on the process for now.

To let it be like an artistic movie: something I don't have to understand or agree with. Something that is an art form and a mystery and all that matters is how I feel inside and what it means to me. Which can be different every session, every instant.

No labels. No conclusions. No theories!! Just experience. Just letting it happen however it will.

We'll see what happens.

Novelty

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 16 October 2007

Just a random thought for the morning. Some background trivia to explain where the thought came from.

Trivia: One of the things that brought up the research into 'intrinsic target properties', was based on human senses, and the way they are much more sensitive to change/novelty than to repetition. (Shannon Entropy: A Possible Intrinsic Target Property [pdf] by Edwin C. May, S. James P. Spottiswoode, and Christine L. James. Journal of Parapsychology Vol. 58, pp. 384-401, 1994.)

Trivia: I think we all have realized that 'changing up' one's RV process, whether method or any other element of the process, often seems to have an initial improved-result-impact. Initially this often leads people to be sure that whatever they just changed is THE ANSWER, FINALLY, but after awhile most viewers realize this is a fairly predictable effect is all--and alas, it does wear off.

Trivia: Cue-ing for data within a session is an issue of novelty. Change a word, a phrasing, a perspective in space or time, or even other more unusual ways of focusing, and you create a 'new cue' that can often prompt new data. A given cue (whether to self or from other) seems to have a lifespan ranging from once to who-knows how many but not infinite "provoked responses" in data form. Dowsing really can bring home how changing a single word can change response, but even in viewing I think most viewers with a little experience figure out how important novelty in cue-ing is. Some degree of the value of a monitor could be in the sheer 'novelty' factor of their cueing based on the live experience, for example.

OK, so humans are more sensitive to change with their body-senses... viewer intuitive response often seems re-set/re-freshed from a change in the prompt/cue... viewer results often seem re-set/re-refreshed from a change in any part of the viewing process. It's all the same dynamic.

Although this is one reason I always recommend people use as many tasking and feedback forms and sources as possible, I hadn't really focused on this aspect of it clearly in my head before.

CHANGE. Maybe deliberately planning a constant change after so many sessions, would be useful. Maybe changing out a few basics even of the personal process such as standard self-cue's and things like that, should be part of that. I've come to this idea before several times over the years so I'm wondering why I quit thinking about it whenever that was, or why it seems novel again. (Heh. The advantage of being an airhead. New ideas every day!)

The funny thing is, this dynamic really seems to hold for everything. For weight lifting building muscle, for eating plans and fat loss, as two examples of stuff I also work on regularly, it always seems like there is an initial effect and then it ramps down to a holding pattern of sorts, where the body fights for homeostasis.

Well the psychology fights for homeostasis like crazy. That's half the psychological challenge with viewing in protocol, is how hard the body/mind fights to regain a 'known' footing/belief system. "Change=death to the psychology," as we've all heard. Yet growth only happens when homeostasis is absent, or as the old baseball saying goes, "You can't steal second with one foot on first."

Maybe when we plan our own viewer development, when we work out managing our own tasking and method and so on, a deliberately randomized set of changes in our process should be part of that. Maybe at the first sign of a few sessions in a row that don't go well, change should be implemented.

This makes me think (ok, now I'm just rambling!) of live sports performance. We are least challenged to develop when we only spar with an opponent on things we know, or do planned drills we expect. It's the sheer novelty of the fight or the game that forces us to adapt and grow. I wonder if literally creating a little utility that lets a viewer put in a variety of options for every component of their viewing (tasking or target source, a dozen diff points in their method-process, various cue-ing they do in-session, etc.) and having it randomized would actually be useful. So like, if you sat down to do an 'exercise', on the spot you'd have a custom, fairly unpredictable combination of elements. Each one would be familiar, so it wouldn't be like losing the consistency of doing-what-you-know, but the combination of them would be random, so it might be more like the novelty-of-the-live-event. Ya think? OK, rambling off, need to get back to work here.

Planets and Remote Viewing

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 28 May 2007

I sometimes think it's the world's greatest irony that some of the most 'impactive' experiences in viewing are the targets with no feedback.

(Which reminds me I've sometimes wondered if the lack of a decent time window on some taskings actually makes the viewing experience potentially more intense because there is inherently 'more information' in the 'target'.)

Last week TKR's Mission was tasked by Marv, and it was "the lakes on Titan", or something like that. I don't know why, but the stuff on other planets is just so damned interesting. Although I've had some sessions that sucked on planets, I've also had some interesting things, from one years ago on Titan (see that link above), to one on Ganymede I blogged about here (that was more after-session interest), and in the past a couple interesting sessions on Saturn.

Of all the missions TKR has done, some of my faves are their planet-related missions. Like there was "Something on Mars" that I tasked in the early days (years ago), the "Mars Home Plate" that Benton tasked over a year ago, and there are some earth-bound tasks that are directly about anomalies that are pretty fascinating, from The Dropa Enigma to The Metal Ball Mystery, both of which sort of defy 'technology we have/had available, far as we know' and make one wonder about the larger universe around us.

I also sometimes wonder, since I tend to grant "some degree of awareness" to everything, and "identity" to many things most people wouldn't, if planets themselves may have a pretty rocking-sized sentience that might make ours look pretty puny by comparison. Ever since my session with Ganymede I've been wondering that.

Not just about planets, but about targets on a larger scale. How much of what we perceive is about what the target chooses to share with us?

A Primer on AOL

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 26 May 2007

As most viewers online already know, Remote Viewing semantics are especially at issue on the internet, where words are all people have to work with. Even without issues like social politics or differing approaches to the discipline, even in groups with much in common, viewers still often get lost in the semantics of discussion.

That isn't just the modern world or the internet, of course; this has been an historical problem with parapsychology around the world, perhaps in part due to a severe lack of 'shared experience'-based terminology.

Remote Viewing's terminology is rather colorful. The patchwork history of the nature of anything psychic, and RV's former exploration in science and military, both renowned for their ability to coin complicated terms and no end of acronyms, and RV's modern commercial sales market of the last decade+, which is usually presented in a virtual snowglobe of uber-hip Matrix-Technojargon, all have combined to make RV terminology inconsistent at best, often confusing at the least -- and sometimes funny as hell.

Many viewers know some basic terminology from psychic methods training. But how well they understand it may be another story. Most folks learn this when they are so brand-spankin'-new to the subject that they really wouldn't know what questions to ask, and they are mostly introduced to the level of understanding they are ready for at that moment, which is fairly shallow. Follow-up is the weakest point in the commercial field, so deeper understanding of things doesn't always arrive. As if that isn't enough, what is taught is often in question as well, or at the least, differs greatly between sources.

I've seen some casual usage of terminology that is "gleaned from others," over in the dojo, but is probably not well covered online.

So for the sake of those new to the subject, I'm going to talk a little about one of the common jargon-terms in RV: "AOL."

This is broken into several parts to make it a little easier to get through.

Analytical Overlay, also known as AOL
AOL: The Labels of Conclusion
AOL and Learning Theory
AOL and 'Allowing', AKA "Let it Be"
AOL: Slightly More Complex Considerations
AOL: Slightly More Subtle Considerations
AOL the Temptress
Issues That Worsen or Invoke AOL
AOL from Target Pools
Using AOL Notation During Session
What Matters About Annotating AOL
New Viewers and AOL
When it's Data, it's not AOL
Exercises to Improve AOL Avoidance & Handling
AOL: The Point of it All

---

Analytical Overlay, also known as AOL

This term was originally used in psychic work to refer to the analysis the conscious mind is always trying to apply to our data.

At the entry level, the first and simplest way to think about this is "labels". Our mind immediately attempts to evaluate and conclude "what something is," and presents us with the highest-level "conclusion" about it. For example, instead of presenting data components such as 'red', 'motion' and 'spinning', our mind might present: "a red car".

Outside of psychic work, this is probably the way we've always needed our info anyway. If a friend is driving up in his car, we don't want to receive the data in 5000 separate components we have to consciously put together before we can even figure out what's going on.

If human mental processing were that slow, we wouldn't have survived the saber-toothed tigers.

AOL: The Labels of Conclusion

We probably do get information about events in 5000 components, but our minds are used to evaluating all that, putting it together for us, slapping a summary on it (Jimmy's car is headed for my driveway at normal speed) and handing us "the label of conclusion".

We rely on this as a norm. But when we begin viewing, we suddenly don't our mind actively and rapidly working to obtain "the labels of conclusion" anymore. In viewing, we seldom have enough information flow at least right-off, for those labels to be accurate. But since this way of mental processing is a lifetime habit, it's a bit of work (to understate it) to change your ways.

AOL and Learning Theory

Let us say, in this over-simplistic (and commonly used) example, that we had the sense of round (the wheels), the sense of motion, the sense of red, maybe even a sense of fun, or of speed, all of which were probably accurate, or likely enough.

Alas, "a red car" is simply wrong as data. If we write down this data, we later compare our session to the feedback photo of two children playing with a red ball and we roll our eyes over how clueless we were. "Well, I got the red," we might tell ourselves glumly.

The worst part of that equation has to do with our learning. It's important that we consciously recognize the data components that we did get accurately, and those we did not, and what processing we applied--which either helped or harmed. That's how we learn, is getting feedback on our process results.

When our session only leaves us with information that doesn't match the target, new viewers especially are prone to just sigh, feel like dismal failures at this psychic stuff, and wander off forlornly, thinking they are a lost cause. That's because most their 'results' are packaged in "labels of conclusion" which do not match the target.

The viewer being able to obtain data at a more 'component' level and record it that way is about the only way a new viewer will get real feedback on what actually "came through," and how they "interpreted" each bit, and how they communicated it. That's when feedback can be applied and the "learning theory" part of practice can kick in and do the viewer some good.

Genuine AOL is a matter of the viewer repackaging or over-translating the information, which can range from a very mild flavoring to radical revision. It's like a bad internet language translator but in concept-shape form. It can be pretty funny at its more extreme levels.

In the example we started with, you might ask why the mind didn't know it was a ball instead of a car. Well, maybe eventually the mind would have. But the initial data in a session is often in small fragments: a sense of reflection, a horizontal motion, a color, a spinning. That is what the mind had to work with, and it did its best at the analytical process.

That's part of the problem, really: there isn't enough information for the mind to use its fabulous tools in the normal way. As Spock (and later Data) used to say on Star Trek, "I have insufficient data for a hypothesis." Our mind is stuck trying to do its job as wonderfully as it has always done it, but under impossible circumstances.

It's up to the viewer to help keep the mind 'open' long enough, and well enough, that sufficient data can pour through prior to expectations filtering or distorting the experience.

Some viewers survive this for about 5 or 10 minutes. They shouldn't even be allowed to view past that: their sessions rock that long and then totally suck thanks to AOL. That's just a visible example of the tenure of their ability to keep the right mental state in place. Up till the point where that expires, they might be amazing. If they could start breaking their sessions up into shorter sessions done more often, they'd probably be better off.

Control Issues and 'Allowing', AKA "Let it Be"

This analytical processing may be somewhat below the fully intentional level, but the impetus for it happening is at the conscious level. It is a matter of training yourself into the "allowing". You must allow the target to be whatever it is, without pressuring yourself in the "need to know", which translates directly into your making the target into what you assume it is instead.

The tendency is pretty much human nature it appears, at least prior to bringing conscious intervention into that process (and possibly is a fight forever). But how often, how quickly, and how severely that is invoked, in my opinion ends up being something like a psychological control issue.

Everybody has some degree of this because our mind has been working with us in that way our entire lives. But some people can't let go of this "need to know". High J's on the ENTJ personality scale probably are a good example; those with major control issues are another. I am exampling the more extreme versions of a trait we all carry, but some a lot more than others. Some people are simply not cut out for this kind of art.

A viewer must be able to relax and let go of at least enough of the need to know, at least long enough to get decent data. That doesn't mean that a viewer is always going to be free of it -- or even ever fully, depending -- it's a matter of degree. It's also a matter of the viewer being able to recognize, in session, when they are falling into this mindset to a high degree, and either let it go, or end the session and come back to it another time.

Like most things in remote viewing, the issues viewers have are echoed in other roles. The same problems with "AOL" in people functioning as taskers and monitors have done a great deal of damage to their viewers and RV's reputation in public media, so it's worth pointing out that AOL--particularly "untreated" AOL let alone fostered AOL--is very damaging to psi work across the board, no matter what role it is played out within.

AOL: Slightly More Complex Considerations

Analytical over-processing of data is really just one of many likely issues in a remote viewing session. There's a long list of internal processing behaviors and filters that affect data as badly or worse than purely "analytical" issues.

To some degree, the term AOL is used as an "umbrella" term to represent what I initially called "Affected Data" about ten years ago. Data can be "affected" in many ways. The reasons this can happen are incredibly numerous, and likely to vary a little depending on the viewer.

The reasons are not just analytical. They can be a result of the sheer novelty of something and not knowing how to translate it, for example. Or, they can be the result of an empathetic emotion from the viewer, or of aesthetic-impact upon the viewer, or other in-session experience that has its own "progression" into other assumptions that are often less logical than emotional.

Some viewers or methods trainers have come up with their own vocabulary of acronyms to describe different possibilities.

AOL: Slightly More Subtle Considerations

AOL as exampled at the beginning of this article, "labeling", is really the easiest, most obvious aspect of the issue. Most AOL when a viewer first begins does come in this form. Or at least, so much of it comes in this form that you don't get much chance to even see the other issues that might be lurking! But with some experience, the example given becomes over-simplistic to say the least.

The most dangerous AOL is not the labeling, because that type, a viewer can learn to recognize pretty easily. The more subtle and nasty forms of AOL usually stem from other sources.

For example, there may be a low-grade AOL regarding the likely 'nature' of the target, possibly based on the tasking source. This might never become strong enough for the viewer to recognize, but it may bias and filter their whole session. This is a bad thing when it makes the data more-wrong, but it can be a worse thing when it makes the data more-right. At least you learn something from being wrong, often. And the AOL drive may give the session a more 'intense' experiential aspect for the viewer, which can result in a greater sense of certainty for sure, and if they do this often enough, the viewer may end up subconsciously biasing in favor of situations where they have some way of knowing or suspecting the target because, plain and simple, it is a lot more fun that way.

There may be a more obvious AOL regarding thinking something in the session is AOL--because the data is just like another target you just had, or just like a movie you just watched, for example, or even, is just like you would have analytically-via-AOL expected it to be (because, ironically, your AOLs from the early session may have been correct). In this case, the analytical assumption is that it IS analytical assumption--an invalidation of the data you're receiving, which is usually just as damaging to a session as anything else. This tends to result in viewers getting wonderful data they "don't write down because they're sure it's AOL," and then they want to kick themselves afterward when they see the feedback.

One of the common causes of AOL once the viewer is getting into the groove of viewing, is the way that information presents itself. The viewer may have a flash visual of something, and they may think that is the target. It might be, but usually, it is not. (Only the viewer can make this call, as best they can.) Usually, it is something in the viewer's mental database of experience that has something in common with the target... but which other than some major aspect (which can be shape, concept, or a combination of factors), has nothing to do with it. (See 'exceptions', later in the article.)

There are pretty much no limits to the possible 'sources' of AOL or 'data-affecting issues'. Every human is unique and every viewer could probably find a dozen new ways.

AOL the Temptress

AOL if recognized and released is usually not all that damaging to the viewer or session. (Obviously, circumstance and details vary.) It may be just a minor point of observation, released and the viewer moves on.

But that mental 'base of assumption' tends to grow, especially if not recognized and dealt with. It can bias the mind toward recognizing only data which fits the filter of expectation, as an early problem. It can literally help create data which fits the expectation, which is a larger problem. Usually though, the mind's ability to creatively configure even what does come in, is more than enough flexibility to "help" the viewer make the session into exactly what they "suspect" -- which translates to what they want, because the lack of closer and not-knowing in a session is psychologically very difficult.

AOL's biggest tragedy in a session isn't usually what it does to the data with which it arrives, but what it does to every "experience" for the viewer which follows. And for sure, attempting to 'surgically remove' AOL from data in retrospect is easier said than done.

Suspicion can function as AOL, including AOL-Drive which is the term some use for when the session is totally driven by some form of assumption, expectation, etc. One of the more insidious things about AOL is that the more of it the viewer gets, the more tempted to follow that road they might be. It feels GOOD to have a 'suspicion' about what something in the target might be, and viewers often unconsciously "retask" themselves on "that-thing-I-suspect" in the middle of a session, shifting the focus away from "the target" and onto "this thing I just perceived or that I think is the target."

Issues That Worsen or Invoke AOL

Knowing your tasker can help invoke AOL in a viewer based on the assumed nature of the tasking. I've suffered that more than once. It's especially insidious if the nature of the target (for example, The World Cup sporting event, people with painted faces, etc.) has something in common with the nature of your AOL (that the tasker tends to task big disasters, terrorism, etc.) because then it "skews your AOLs" or helps create them.

To deal with it: you can use an RV tool like Taskerbot to mix up your tasks, so even if you only have a few, you won't be sure of the source when they are given to you. tbot Tasker allows a super simple entry of nothing more than task numbers for example, for tasks that already exist. It isn't tasking you, it's simply handing the tasks to you in a random order to help increase the blinding factor.

The best way to work against having any expectation at all about the target is (a) the widest variety of task sources or task genres, and (b) experience. Once you've had the chronic experience of having no idea what the hell you were talking about in a session, and you see how assumptions whether gross or subtle messed you up, you get a little better at not coming to a conclusion because you know too well that you have NO IDEA what it might be.

AOL from Target Pools

Familiarity with a target pool can be one of the worst sources of chronic AOL. Target pool AOL is pretty obvious when observing sessions of people suffering it and it's painful even from a distance.

I give this a separate section of its own because any practice utility that people can use at their own discretion, and especially those where they can see what other viewers get as tasks, is going to engender some target pool aol. Most viewers don't do enough viewing to run into this if the pool is at least 500+ tasks, but occasionally you get folks who do 20-50 mini-sessions a day, plus look at what others do, and the result is that before long, even in a pool of well over a thousand tasks, they're going to end up with target pool AOL.

I see this pretty often over at TKR at the Dojo Psi, with viewers who are either brand new and still big on the assuming, or who are so over-familiar with the pool that a good portion of the time, shortly into the session they have either identified the target entirely by the feel of it, or they have identified enough elements to come to a conclusion that it is another target (which probably has something in common with this one which led to that).

Usually the initial data is good, but at some point the mind decides what it 'might' be, at which point suddenly the viewer veers off into describing the assumed target. The difficult part of this is that a viewer gets what they focus on. When a viewer is in session and suddenly gets enough data to suggest it's target X, they often unconsciously shift their attention to target X, or some of it. At that point, they might legitimately be getting 'psychic information', but they've unintentionally retasked themselves in the middle of the session on a different target.

Like other kinds of AOL drive this can be more dangerous when accurate than inaccurate, since at least you'd learn from being wrong, but being right may unintentionally 'teach' the viewer to allow that to happen. It also causes great confusion in the mental-processing part of RV, because a lot of what might come through for the viewer are bits of memory, not psi-derived data, another thing that one doesn't want to entrain oneself to perceive as-if-its-psi.

It's true that some people have learned to work with target pools they know decently, and that training oneself against frontloading/tp-aol can be a good exercise. But it's rather like wearing bad shoes to jog in. Just because you can do so, doesn't mean it's a very helpful thing to do... might even be harmful... there are no karmic brownie points for unnecessary suffering.

There are many sources of free targets on the internet, or that your friends can help you with, not to mention many ways to use precognitive tasking to task yourself on all kinds of things regularly that are still blind to you -- you know the target (e.g., Tuesday's headline in newspaper XYZ) but not the detail. There are many ways to dig yourself out of an over-used target pool, and it's well worth seeking them out.

In a perfect world, viewers would focus as much on live-feedback and current-time targets as possible, just because the feedback tends to be greater and the interest factor tends to be higher, both of which can have a great effect both on the session and on the learning component.

Using AOL Notation During Session

In standard 'methods' training (swann-based training methods), AOL is used as a notation when the data is recorded.

These methods were developed to be training methods, and the point of them is to be an external roadmap to helping the viewer become more aware internally of what is going on in their head, what they are experiencing and how they are processing the information. In my view this was a good idea, since we haven't yet evolved to the technology of being able to open up people's heads and look inside them. So, you have people record what they perceive, and you teach them to recognize certain things in what they are recording that should be an 'indicator' of something going on inside them.

(At least, in a better understanding of the methods than many people have, this is the purpose. Whether this is fulfilled by the way they are taught may be another story, depending on the trainer and situation.)

It appears that truly getting anything out of your system that is in your head/heart requires physically acting out the expression of it. Or in plain english, in a remote viewing context, saying it or writing it down. Even recognizing something as AOL in your head does not tend to be as effective for many viewers in "letting it go" as writing it down "as" AOL.

Oddly, saying or writing down things which are true or accurate seems mostly to better confirm them within yourself. If I were better versed on this research I believe I could reference some here; both of these points have been studied. I'm too lazy right now so, if you want to know more, google it.

In the methods, when a viewer recognizes something as aol, they write it to the far right side of the paper, and annotate it "AOL".

In practice, the point of this is to help the viewer recognize when this kind of processing has happened in their head, and to allow them to 'vent' that assumption. In content viewing (where the session content is used for some purpose, such as science or applications), it can serve to tell the onlooking interviewer (monitor) or a later analyst what was going on with the viewer.

When viewers begin, they usually only have the "labels are AOL" level of understanding about this. Eventually, if they get data like "car" they write it down as AOL because they recognize the label as "processed data".

But realistically, even "brown" is processed data. Maybe not as processed as "A Roman Chariot" for example, but the mere act of translating something to the level of words is processing. So initially, this act of writing it down for novices mostly serves to cause them to pay attention to the more obvious "labeling" tendency.

In other words, new viewers don't write down AOL because it is AOL. They write it down because it is a label and they have been taught that labels are AOL.

In the later stages of most RV methodologies, AOL can sometimes be written as AOL-signal if the viewer chooses. That means that although the viewer recognizes it is AOL, they also believe that it is directly related to the target anyway.

What Matters About Annotating AOL

For the viewer themselves, the important thing about annotating something as AOL is recognizing and releasing it; is realizing it is a mentally-manufactured or over-processed data point. Also, realizing this means that the viewer can often stop, replay the "data experience or observation" they just had, in their head, and better evaluate what they really DID experience, in its components, and better articulate it for recording.

In other words, it's not just recognizing what data may be affected; it is also being able to recognize that issue on the fly, while you are viewing, so that you can figure out what the data should be--or what the data actually was, prior to your head getting carried away with it.

For anybody evaluating the session, annotating something as AOL is the viewer's way of saying: "This was not a psi-based impression or experience. I recognize that this was just something my head has 'affected'. Even if it is accurate, it should not be considered data."

The "AOL-signal" notation would instead say: "This data is affected in some way by my mental processing, but I believe the core of this was based on psi." This functions almost as a way of saying, "This relates to something in the target, but whatever it is, is probably not this."

Ordinary "AOL" annotated data is generally disregarded when evaluating a session. The viewer themselves is telling you, "This isn't psi based information and I am just venting it to get rid of it." There is no reason for an evaluator to want to equate that to data that the viewer genuinely perceived as a psi-based experience. AOL is a viewer's "discard" pile. That does not mean the data point is wrong, by the way.

Sometimes in session a viewer will sense themselves going into a sort of "free association" or "logical correlation" mode. Things flashing into their head related to that would be AOL. Sometimes, a viewer gets a few pieces of info via psi, and feels their mind come to some logical conclusion based on that. They write it down as AOL to vent that and move on.

New Viewers and AOL

A common mistake new viewers make is to write down so much of the 'noise' in their head that instead of remote viewing, they simply spend an entire session writing down AOLs. They end up with sessions that are 50%++ AOL notation. Sometimes this is because they are so new, that they are not easily able to tell what "pings" inside their head are such light mental associative fluff that it is not an 'impression' -- or anything even potentially one. Unless one has got the state of Zen No-Mind down pat, every viewer is going to have to gradually learn enough about what comes-from their head vs. what comes-into their head (and there is a middle, joined ground, too) that they do not feel obliged to spend 20 minutes recording their free association. Half the time, the recording of it simply creates more of it and they never even get around to viewing.

As a solution to that I recommend new viewers write down "what they feel is important or relevant about the target, even stuff they imagine." Usually the "important or relevant" filter will gradually help them get a feel about what is a bunch of unrelated mental fluff they can just ignore. Sometimes, taking the trouble to recognize something, stop, and write it down, gives it far more credit than it deserves, plus it shifts your attention from focused on the target with receptive mind, to focused on the paper with projective communication. It just takes some practice to figure out what is 'subtle' enough to be dismissed as light surface mental wandering, vs. what has enough 'feeling' or 'impression' with it that it counts as data. Either way, AOL is not viewing. The RV session needs to actually contain some psychic work.

Another common mistake viewers (even with more experience) might make is using AOL as a "safety net." It's like their Monopoly Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card. They figure if they mark something AOL it's ok for it to be wrong; it's like a "free" data point because one has already declared it "more processing than psi". So you can say anything you want as long as you mark it AOL.

Ah, but then you find that when they review their session, if they have something valid annotated AOL, then everybody wants to take credit for it! This is not appropriate. Part of learning RV is learning to "own your data", is learning to take responsibility for it, be willing to go with what you experience and do your best and face the results, no matter how they match or don't, learn something from the experience and move on.

Also, part of using any annotation is using it correctly, of course. Psychic impressions do not belong in the AOL column.

When it's Data, it's not AOL

There are plenty of examples where data that is a noun, a label, and even a highly processed data point, for that matter even an entire location or situation of highly processed information, is genuinely based on psi-perception. It is not about secondary processing by the viewer making it something complex or labeled. It is literally what the viewer experienced.

If the viewer has a sense of flying over an island and zooming down near a woven bridge in lush greenery and seeing a small village on fire, then that is their data. Their data is not "flying. island-aol. zooming. bridge-aol. greenery. village. fire." but to hear some people define AOL you'd think so. That is working against psi, and against the viewer, and using the red-tape bureaucracy of something designed to help, to instead hinder the process.

Psychics often run into this when they begin working in an RV protocol. They are often used to opening up and BAM they've got more information in 30 seconds than some viewers could get in 30 hours. And some people naturally get much larger data constructs. They may write down labels because they quite literally experience things in that more 'data-combined' form.

This may require more work on the viewer's part to prevent that kind of mental combining from happening even when it shouldn't. To the degree it works for them... great, they should go for it. What matters is what works. Usually it's a good exercise, if you get data this way, to make a point after anything you write down like that, to then flesh out how it feels inside you; the components that make it that-thing. Be sure though, that you are not describing what you intellectually know that-thing contains, but rather, that you are describing what you psychically feel that-thing contains. When this happens, the viewer ends up with a combination of labels (as data, not as aol) and detailed descriptions.

It usually won't take long before they realize that focusing on the more component information, will provide a ton more data that might be useful. RV is not about matching pictures after all; it's about providing "descriptive information" to someone who wants to use it. So the more accurate, detailed description that can be provided, the better.

The viewer's data should be based on their experience. Whatever that may be. Describe it as best you can, whether that means sketching (always a good idea if you can), taking shorthand, writing an essay, or talking into a recording device. It's up to the viewer to communicate the data as well as they can.

Sometimes, based on the wholly subjective experience in their session, they may feel that "parsing down" the information to basic fact-phrases is what is best. Sometimes, they may feel that waxing eloquently about a whole experience and feeling is what is best. This is up to the viewer, unless they use a methodology that restricts them. If your methodology insists you write all your data in words or tiny phrases in logical columns, then either you need to adapt to that, or you need to ditch at least some of that method and explore what comes naturally for you and develop your strengths as best you can.

Let's say (a funny real example of a viewer friend of mine) you're in session and you see a cartoon Snoopy Flying Ace and you 'know' the target is a fighter plane. It doesn't matter that your data isn't even what you experienced. It doesn't matter that your data is definitely a highly processed thing. If you are pretty sure you know the data is a fighter jet, not because your head is making the association or assumption, but because you feel in your gut that this is what it means, then that is what goes on paper. If you're wrong, you will gradually learn what sense perceptions you are willing to gamble accuracy on and what you aren't.

If you are practicing for yourself, do record this processing for your records. For example, you might write down: "sym> Snoopy Flying Ace = fighter plane" so later, you will know that you got data you believe is symbology, and then here is what you believe the information actually translates to. This is important, because later when you review past sessions (which you should definitely do. I've learned more from past-session review than actual viewing I think.) you may see certain commonalities in symbols, or in how you translate symbols.

(This is assuming the viewer gets symbology as data. Most do, but not all.)

There is another kind of data that is not psychic, it is analytical, but I do not consider AOL, because it is not overlay 'affecting' data, it is understanding 'explaining' data, instead.

This is when, during a time when the data seems relative flowing or more contextual, when the viewer may write down something like "red star > ana = Russian". The difference between this and the symbology is that (a) this may be data that is not symbolic (only this example was), and (b) this is not about the viewer "feeling" a gut-sense of what-it-means, this is about a sheer mental recognition on the viewer's part that when they get data X and Y, it usually means Z and they believe it does this time.

Technically the session is not the place for analysis obviously, but a viewer with experience is likely to sometimes recognize one or more data components, or their sequence, as having a likely meaning that may not be obvious on paper if they don't write it down.

Exercises to Improve AOL Avoidance & Handling

There are several ways a viewer can work toward improving how they avoid and/or 'deal with' AOL in session, whether directly or as a side-effect (positive benefit) of other issues. Here are a few pretty powerful things that I recommend.

1. If you record anything as AOL, ask yourself what it is based upon. If you got 'little red car', the instant you realize it's AOL, ask yourself: 'What made me think of that'? Hopefully, you will then realize that a sense of small, round, red, motion, fun, was rapidly flipping through your mind. At that point, write down the real data. Eventually, the goal is that a viewer instantly recognizes when it's happened, flips back memory a few seconds to their original perception for replay, and writes down the proper information.

Of course, this eventually leads to a viewer simply sitting down and viewing. Other people say, "Look, he doesn't even have a method! He's just a natural." Yeah, riiiiiiight. There is a good deal of RV that can be, and in my opinion eventually should be, done in the viewer's head (in part for immediacy reasons). The viewer records what results. The external methods many people use are good training for brand-newbies and for the gradual, uniquely individual development of internal methods by a viewer. If for no other reason than rigidity and time, eventually for most (not all) viewers I know, external stuff gives way to a more flexible and more internal approach. Yes, the data eventually gets to the paper, but the 'session experience' tends to get processed fast enough in the head that writing down data becomes primary, not writing down process.

2. When you get feedback on a session, that moment is of key importance. Don't rush on to some other target or activity. Sit down, be quiet, and look at every data point that you wrote down. Read one to yourself. Stop. Look at the feedback. Consider. Does this match? What all might it match? If it doesn't, what was I feeling that caused me to write that down, can I repeat that experience in myself? If I can, and I do, and now I see feedback, how do I think that experience relates to what's in or implied by the feedback? What caused my "experience" in session to get written down as I wrote it? Do this for every single thing you wrote down that is not marked AOL.

Popular methodologies have somewhat attuned people to looking at data as simply right vs. wrong, or nearly always "literal" (as opposed to symbolic, etc.). Worse, it often inspires viewers to end a session and instantly go into a math-test mentality where they start evaluating what category every data point falls into and counting how many they've got and so on. I can't think of anything worse for a viewer than doing this after a session. If you must database your results, do it later. After-session is the most powerful time for psychological review and consideration. The session feedback time is a time of intimacy in a way, where you and your mind can go over the experience you just had together. Don't underestimate how important this is.

3. Never give yourself credit for AOL. If you mark it AOL, it doesn't 'count' as credit for you if it's right. If you want your AOLs to count, own your viewing. If it's real, write it down as real. AOL means it's a mental construct, not psychic data. AOL becomes a CYA cop-out for many viewers, rather than a way of communicating something.

The viewer's "assignment of meaning" is vastly important to their experience and progress and learning. You have to set your internal rewards, recognition, etc. based on what you want to 'teach' yourself. Viewers should set themselves as the driver and owner of their talent and their skill, no matter what their background or who their teachers or what their methods. A great deal of psychic work is affected by a viewer's strong sense of autonomy (or lack thereof) and making yourself take yourself seriously, and not letting yourself get away with excuses, is an important part of developing that strength.

4. It is a good exercise, once a viewer has some experience (not for brand-new viewers), to make an exercise, temporarily anyway, of writing down everything that relates to your session, not just your data. In other words, if you write down "AOL - car" then write down, quickly as you can, WHY 'car' was an AOL. I don't mean why intellectually, I mean what you 'sense' that leads to the 'car' conclusion. A primary point of using an external notation of something is to teach yourself 'awareness' of it. Eventually, while you are viewing, this kind of understanding about yourself should be part of the process. It should not take up big blocks of seconds while stuff gets written down. It should be a micro-second realization, backtrack, data re-vew, and then recording what should be recorded. The external is there to teach the internal. Everything you can do toward that learning process is a good thing.

5. Another exercise worth doing is recording 'how' data comes across to you. For example if you get names, words, or visuals, there are many different ways that these can come through. You may hear a voice say a word; you mean get a 'sense' of a word; you may visually 'see' the word written. Over time, you're likely to find, if you pay attention to this, that "how" data comes through may relate to how literal it may be, and even how accurate it may be. It may also relate to processing issues you have including AOL. It's worth tracking, when you can.

6. Speed during the session can help, mostly because it can reduce the amount of time that the mind has to wander, associate, etc. This is a very good approach for new viewers. In general though, it is a bit of a tradeoff. Being able to truly pay attention and often 'explore' data is lost if one is rushing through it with all haste.

A viewer friend gave a good analogy of this. He said in the gym, many people use music or videos to distract them from their workout exercises and make them seem to go faster, and for the general public level, this works well. But serious athletes and bodybuilders want to pay attention to what they are doing, and so you don't find them 'spacing out' the process, you find them really focusing on it instead. There is something to be said for all-haste: it gets things done, gets you through it, and reduces mental distraction. But there is something to be said for a slower, more focus-intensive effort as well. What approach works best may depend on the target, and the reason for the session, as well as the viewer.

The Point of it All

What 'matters' to a session is that you obtain valid information about the target, much of which is usually correlated with what we call (as slang; nobody can truly define this) "target contact," or "rapport." A few seconds of close target contact can often do more for loads of accurate data, than a much longer period of distant methodical work (and often with less inaccurate data, and less overall data to wade through when trying to make sense of it all). Your practices as far as methods and process go, should serve this goal first.

So how you think about the viewer's interference with data -- including "AOL", often used as a term to encompass nearly every kind of potential interference or affect -- should be considered in the context of what is best for learning about yourself, and what is best for providing accurate information about your target. Experiment if you can. Get a feel for what works for you.

Using AOL in session notation is not necessarily something a viewer "should" do, but anybody "can", and I find it helpful personally. You can make up your own notation if you wish. Some methods use "d:" for "deduction" for example. Every methodology has a whole vocabulary of its own, and most viewers gradually develop a written shorthand for a ton of different stuff, much of which they've come up with for their own unique process.

Words don't make RV. Nothing matters to viewing but the viewing, and nothing matters to the practicing viewer but the experience and the learning. So terminology is worth understanding, and you can use some of it if you wish -- or not. If you don't like it, don't use it. In the end every viewer is responsible for themselves . . . just do what works for you.

But if you want to talk with other people about it, it's a good idea to have a shared vocabulary.

-- PJ

(P.S. I wrote this off the top while sleep deprived--as always. It may be imperfect and I may improve it in places later.)

Wide Awake in Dreamland

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 06 May 2007

Oh. When I wrote the previous post (Ganymede) I meant to write this one but got carried away!

So the archetype model I've been using for sessions lately has been forcing some warping of my brain.

As I left the movie theatre last night, and I walked across the parking lot, it suddenly occurred to me:

If the target is in me; if the archetype is the collected energy of the target; then everything in my reality is in me too.

Just like Seth would say, and the wise ones throughout time, who describe our reality as a non-lucid dream, and just one of many for that matter.

I walked past the cars. I felt a truck go past behind me.

What does it feel like inside me? I wondered. Is there a "feel" to parking lots, for example, that I could become more aware of by thinking about it right now, while having this experience? Would that help me to recognize the feel during session?

Alan Watts talked of this. And Suzuki, and the other writers of Zen (for the West) whom I waded through all those eons ago. Everything outside you is inside you. Inside is the blueprint. Outside is a mirror of it.

Archetype meditations function on this same logic: the universe is inside you. You go inside to make changes. You have a relationship with everything because everything is of you. The secret to control is allowing, the secret to letting go is merging, the secret to mastering is loving and serving.

Joe McMoneagle says: Remote Viewing comes to those who put it first, others second, and themselves third. Maybe that's so.

I was so distracted by my thoughts I drove over a curb. Sigh. I'm becoming a genuine 'airy psychic' sort!

I keep looking at things and asking myself, "How does that table feel inside me? How does the phone ringing feel inside me?"

Ganymede

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 05 May 2007

I went to see the movie "NEXT" tonight. The story is about a man (Nick Cage) who can see the future. But only 2 minutes into the future. He's had the ability his whole life and is extremely deft with its use... while he works as a stage magician at a small casino in Vegas. Worth seeing. Action film, of course!

The last couple days I've really been focusing on viewing and "thinking" in the model of viewing. Working on integrating what I am doing. The archetype approach to RV puts a bit of a different slant on the mental model of it all. It's much more of a "relationship" -- with the target; and because the target is part of me, because everything is, with myself.

I had three pretty decent sessions in the latest model (see the myPsiche blog for notes on the protocol). And then I did a fourth that had a rather unusual outcome.

***

The first thing to note is that the session, compared to feedback, has nothing to do with it. At least, unless there is some kind of odd fish-like creature being mined (on a very small scale) on Ganymede and we don't know about it, which is assuming quite a lot, suffice to say my session was simply off-target. The focus of feedback was it in space of course, so I believe that should have been my viewing perspective. Instead I had some tiny group of people 'visiting' solely for the purpose of catching some kind of bizarre heavy flattish fish through ice. Oh well.

I keep the target woven with me during feedback and my notes, and when I saw the feedback, which looks like a dead grey moon, I sighed. I explained to the target, in my head, that obviously we were both wrong, because look here, this should have been the target and perspective.

The target archetype, however, disagreed.

Now, I've sometimes had targets during session interact with me. I've had archetypes and aspects interact with me. But this is the first time I've ever had a target archetype actually communicate with me somewhat directly -- let alone AFTER the session. And argue!

It's not too hard to figure out why it never happened before: first, although I began doing archmeds prior to session eons ago, I never before had a mental model that had this "interwoven me + target- archetype" model before, so that the target could communicate with me (as opposed to me just getting impressions from it during session).

Secondly, I didn't until now have a model where I kept that weave together during feedback and notes, before asking inner-guide to de-weave us.

The archetype, just like any other archetype in a meditation except this was more real-time real-world, conveyed something that I translated as, "a big hunk of dead rock does not accurately summarize me." He actually seemed slightly put out! Not an emotion, just... well it's too subtly ineffable to put into words I guess.

My curiosity was piqued. I felt the archetype wanted to go back into our session model where I let it show me what IT thinks is important to communicate. Yet the session was over. I already had feedback. Anything after that point would just seem like imagination frankly.

But this kind of communication isn't one-way. It's not a superior, controller kind of thing. It's a mutual friendship. It's a teamwork relationship. So, I was game. I figured, I missed the target obviously, it's already a write-off, this is just experience for fun. Bring it on babe! I just sat back and closed my eyes and literally grinned with the humor of it all.

A big ocean wave crashed down nearly upon me, and then went past, as if I were virtually right beside it. Water everywhere. Swells of the water everywhere, and another wave building. Whoaaaaaa.... I said out loud, opening my eyes and leaning forward a little. That was terrific! Certainly way more "you are here" than any of the session, for sure.

I leaned back and closed my eyes again, and as my head bumped the wall a bit, I felt as if it bumped something hard -- and I was lying on my back on something hard, looking up at the sky, surrounded by water, water literally everywhere as far as the eye could see. The sky was grey. The water didn't have any particular color that I noticed either, at least not from the angle I was seeing it. No, I didn't see any fish, no birds, no people, no typical ocean scene data -- but definitely more than enough ocean, and tidal pull on it, clearly.

So.... obviously, you are telling me that you have ocean, I said to the target archetype. That's terrific. Then I found myself 'flying over' something. It was land, but... well not like anything I've seen before. Imagine, ok, that you are over a really huge system of canyons. Now imagine that the canyons are unusually... well, somewhat more parallel than they normally here, and of dark rock. "I want to go down there," I said to the arch, and my perspective went down, down, really deep, to the bottom of this unbelievably deep canyon. I just stood there at the bottom, looking up, utterly marveling at the sheer enormity of it.

I opened my eyes and changed position. If my RV were that experiential you couldn't keep me from it nearly every waking hour. Well, sometimes it is -- but not often, for sure that it is in the minority. What is this, I asked myself? This is imagination? Look at the picture. It's a moon. It's dead. And yet...

At that moment, I was having a 'mutual experience of equals' with the target, summarized energetically as the archetype. At this point, I didn't just feel humor and good natured willingness. I felt love. I imagined blending warm golden energy into the archetype. You are so beautiful, I told it. Not the tale of someone moved by a visual. The heartfelt gushing of someone whose love for someone makes them beautiful. I felt nearly overwhelmed. Ganymede had ceased to be a target or an archetype to me and had become a legitimate entity in its own right. And I was in love with it.

I sat staring into space for a little bit.

I wanted more feedback. Not because I wanted to see if my experiences were possible. At that moment, it would not have mattered if there was a planetary survey as detailed as Google Earth of the thing contradicting me; I felt I'd just had a personal conversation with the planet-as-identity itself and I wasn't in doubt about it. I just wanted to know more about it, the way you would want to know more about a person you met and were crazy about.

Of course, I told myself, this is blowing protocol.

"You already wrote it off as a totally missed target," part of me thought drily. "How much worse can it get?"

I decided my previous three sessions were solid and factual enough that on this one, I would sacrifice it and do something I so rarely do: go get additional feedback. I wanted to know more than a picture of a moon from space. Anything. So I google'd it: Ganymede. I went to the first link that seemed a science site.

There were several pictures, a couple animations, a supershort video, an audio recording of some frequencies, etc. I looked at a couple of pictures. Yep, the same 'dead moon' as we see pictures of from our own. I feel the target, woven in with me still. Observing my feelings, and what I observe. I look at another photo, this of a rather bizarre sort of dark striped terrain. I realize: That must be the canyons. and I feel the target's interest. And suddenly, it hits me, and I'm so astonished --

-- I had thought of the target showing me itself. I had thought of sharing with the target the process. I had thought of all kinds of things. But I had never once thought of me showing the target how my people perceive it. I had thought of translating from the target into my perspective. Never of translating from my perspective FOR the target! For some reason I was kind of blown away by the concept. Like the whole viewing process but in reverse!

I very slowly viewed the next picture. Got the big resolution one. Slowly scrolled, to show the whole thing. Feeling as if I had become exactly the "universal translator" or "psychic library card" that I had previously referred to: where the target, acting like a remote viewer, perceived its target, which was how-we-perceived-it in our reality. I felt like I was taking it on a sort of tour. I was a tour guide of how earth people perceive it. I got kind of anthropomorphic then to be honest. I quietly said out loud the various text notes, as if to bring them more fully into me so it could grok them, and I really focused on all the information so the transfer would be as clear as possible.

The stats on Ganymede were surprising. It's nearly 2.5x the size of earth. It has a small magnetosphere and it appears to have even a very small possibly oxygen atmosphere, though this is still theory. In fact it has everything that would qualify it as a planet, except that it orbits jupiter instead of the sun.

It is said to be greatly covered by water-ice. I don't know if this means it could have oceans, or only ice. I'm here to tell you that experientially, I think it has at least one genuine, definitely liquid-form ocean. But the only feedback I have says the planet is covered with ice. Which means the feedback contradicts my experience.

Being the logical, careful about protocol, practical kind of viewer I am...

...I choose to believe my experience over any amount of feedback. HA HA HA.

And wouldn't you know, out of that four session block, three of which were good, one of which was excellent, the experience that would move me most would be the one that was NOT remote viewing and had no feedback. Sigh! Is that predictable or what? Oh brother.

Back to practical things now.

I AM a "Universal Translator"

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 03 May 2007

"You get what you focus upon," the wise ones say.

The other day I decided to focus on what I really wanted to do with remote viewing. I sat down and I made myself a list. It looked like this:

Viewing
Writing - fiction, as well as psi-related non-fiction
Taking in and Presenting projects for viewing (PM for Apps)
Arranging practice/development regimens for viewers
PMing software development for viewing/dowsing
Talking to police/investigators about viewing
Talking to the media and others about viewing
Managing protocol projects for predictive viewing

And yet, when I looked at the list afterward, all I could think was,

"There is no feeling of life in me when I read that. How dull."

A little on the 'viewing' and the 'writing' top items. Everything else just seemed rather like a boring shopping list of what I might expect, or intellectually want. It could have been a laundry or shopping list for all it sparked in me.

It just didn't MOVE me. And I felt like it should.

"What do I want to do with viewing?" I asked myself, wondering at my reaction.

"What drives me? Something obviously drives me after 12 years of obsession. What is it?"

I didn't know. I finally moved it to the back part of my brain and went on with my life.

o0o

A day or two later I was doing some ARV sessions (these are very short). I don't normally use archetype RV with these because 10-20 minutes of lead-in time for a 5 minute session seems a bit like overkill frankly. But I felt like it so I did with one of them. Mostly it was fun because of Inner Guide, or IG for short, whom I adore.

I finished the first session and began the archmed process for the second when it suddenly hit me.

I am a UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR. That is my path. That is what moves me. That is what drives me. Feeds me. Calls me. Loves me.

I don't want to "objectively know information." I know that is the cool thing. I know that is the hip "intelligence soldiers use this" approach. I know that is the 'controller' perspective.

But it isn't mine.

Screw objectivity. I want to share perception with the other.

o0o

Yes I know that "too much subjectivity can affect perception and bias communication". So hey, if I'm working for someone else maybe I'll take that into account. Maybe. Maybe there are benefits that make it worth it. But I don't view for other people anyway. I don't view for the cause of viewing. I view for me. For how it makes me feel inside.

I've shared 'awareness' with objects before. More than once. Even with a tornado in session. With other people, both spontaneously and in session. With a whole environ.

"Shared perception" is what I've dubbed an "Identity Interference Factor" or IIF for short (how I love acronyms): it is one of the experiential aspects of remote viewing that I consider most "destabilizing" in its side- and after- effects.

o0o

I probably shouldn't blog after watching 'Heroes' since it darkens my vision a bit. But I don't think it changes. It just brings out a part of me that is normally buried behind long-suffering optimism.

Conscious psi by nature is destabilizing. You cannot change the most fundamental belief systems about reality and have it be no big deal. Remote Viewing, just like psychic work and magical exploration since the dawn of time, leaves more lunacy in its path than any other notable effect. From the chronic paranoia that low-level effects seem to spark in people, to serious problems distinguishing truth and reality and identity.

We all thought RV would make us omniscient. Once upon a time. Yet almost nobody stays with it, statistically. And of those who do, a disproportionate number eventually demonstrate they are at least half mad. At least.

Identity Interference Factors rock the boat of sanity. On the bright side, most people are more spared by their lack of serious talent than the lack of conscious psi's real results.

I believe I can.... 'adapt'. Will I be the same person after deliberately seeking out archetypal-level connection with all my targets? No. I am not the same after every target I do. I believe I have a guiding principle, in Inner Guide, in Archangel Michael, in intent, that will shape what I call me for the better over time.

Everyone changes. Some just change more quickly, and more profoundly, than others.

o0o

Identity. Perspective. A shift in perspective is the one thing that is most deeply rooted in me, even in experiences long prior to ever hearing of RV. That novelty rocks my world, feeds my soul, and gives me a kind of primal, soul-centered excitement that is almost too much to bear.... and ineffable.

That's what drives me. That's what I love the most. That's what I crave when I start really viewing consistently. That's what wakes the fire inside me.

I want to merge. I want to share perspective. I want to feel it inside me. It's sex of the spirit. It's recognizing and validating the parts of my innermost self, my energy that ARE what I perceive as a reflection in my outside world.

o0o

So I was right. My list was boring. It didn't have "me" in it. It didn't have the core of energy that pulls me to viewing like an astral love affair. It was just plans, and logic, and words on paper. That isn't what RV is to me.

For a dozen years I've shied away from viewing when I started getting deep. I've run from the time it demands, from the obsession and "driven" qualities that I always have but it seems to invoke at deeper levels, and from the severe lack of giving-a-damn that it always brought for my interest in helping others and the field at large. I've been more good to RV while barely viewing, I have felt.

Maybe I don't care so much anymore. I'm coming around to a change in that perspective. In that interest in much beyond my own development. Maybe it's the slight shifts that every target, touched that way, recognized as my inside, brings. Sometimes I think I am becoming something. A Me+, perhaps. It still feels like me. I still call it me. But it's not the me I was yesterday or will be tomorrow. And maybe everybody has that experience. Maybe I'm the one who, because of my interest in 'perspective' and 'identity', notices it.

o0o

Long ago, Jung worked with archetypes. Scared the hell out of himself. Stated, and quite rightly, that it was so powerful it was literally dangerous. But since then, the 'Inner Guide' model came along. And that has always worked perfectly for me for archetype work. Even powerful, soul-shaking, mind-blowing experiences as sometimes occur during archetype work.

I use inner guide in sessions, with Archetype RV. And when I'm done I have him separate us. I keep my memory. I keep the slightly-larger me that results. I keep the feel, the taste, of the target. But I feel the separation, the slightly smaller-ness, when IG un-weaves us.

And that's why I'm here. I didn't know it until then. It all sort of hit me in a ROTE as Bob Monroe used to call them, like a huge realization, a whole ball of interrelated thought that "opens up and rolls out inside you".

This is my motive.

This is who I am. I AM... everything.

A psychic library card. A universal translator.

Breathing

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 19 April 2007

I've been doing a lot of thinking the last few days. Ever since the archetype talked to me about time, I've been thinking a lot about that. About time, about space, and the brain-crunching idea of them not being separate really at all.

Along with this, me and my best friend have been having conversations about my reality. Reminding me of all the stuff I know, that Seth would tell me, but that I've kind of moved out of thinking about for a long time. Talking about my physical reality, and what it reflects. Maybe me being uptight. Cluttered. And maybe "hanging on to things," causing a sort of "reality clogging". Maybe anal retentive can be a feng shui effect too. HA HA.

o0o Epiphanies

Today I had a sort of epiphany. Well not like a life-changing thing, but definitely a get-my-act-together kind of thing.

It all started over a chat room.

Since 1993 the TKR forum members have asked for a chat. For a long time I was adamant I wouldn't have one. I didn't have time to have it moderated, I would not allow the head-trip mind-F*** BS that a stupid number of people in the field online lived for in chat rooms, I wouldn't put up with the 'trolls' which were actually viewers from all kinds of sources that resented Any God But Their Own, etc. I was cranky and snappy about it and that was that.

But eventually, some of the TKR Admins themselves were asking. I have a soft spot for all of them. Without them I'd have to be spending all my time reading boards and carrying on monologues. They make that project possible and in doing so, free up a whole lot of my time. (Which is ridiculously limited even with their help.) I want to do anything I can to help them or make them happy.

So, at the time, this was maybe 2-3 years ago, I went out and looked for chat options. I refused the easier stuff, like IRC, because I wanted something that we could control. I once vowed -- and I still maintain -- that I will never again run a project that is fully unmoderated, that allows evil abusers to deliberately stalk and destroy the entire project for everybody. I feel I owe it to anybody who spends their time in anything I run, to at least make sure I can somewhat protect them and their contributions from destruction, by being able to bounce/ban "trolls." That the worst trolls are usually allegedly viewers themselves is one of the great ironies of this field, but never mind.

The affordable options for software that allowed privacy, could be run from my own site (though tying into their server), could have rooms made/dropped on command, could do moderated "guest interview" chats, etc. were few. In the end I settled on a java-based chat hosted in the UK for around 30 bucks a month plus a hefty set up fee. We had the chat room up for awhile. I don't know how long, maybe a year, 18 months? (My time sense is completely distorted. Never believe me when I estimate anything related to time.) We had a few guest chats. I was busy and didn't get off my butt to make more of them happen, but they were fun and interesting.

We usually had a few people show up on Monday nights after the Missions at TKR got feedback. It didn't get much use otherwise though. I made an option in the dojo software, for users to schedule a chat, or to say when someone would be around, but there wasn't much interest it appeared. This could be partly because the people expressing interest were mostly on the forum, while the chat you actually had to get to through the dojo.

After what seemed like eons, I realized how much money I had dished out for something seldom used -- and the software itself kind of drove me nuts anyway -- and so I just canceled the chatserver and figured "eventually, I'll do something else."

In keeping with the laws of Murphy, the minute I canceled it, all kinds of people seemed to want it. It's like something in the universe senses the void. It's like swearing celibacy and then watching people just pour out of the woodwork who are hot to have you. The irony is downright funny. Sort of.

o0o Time marches on.

So it's been a long time and we haven't had a chat room. I decided on what I wanted to get back in October of last year, and made plans. But it cost a bit. About $500-600, plus another $100 for the first year of the chatserver hosting. If I couldn't swing at least half the total amount up front there was no point to doing it, so I kept putting it off, not having that much at one time.

Time marches on. "Real Soon Now" in my world has the subjectivity of my time attached to it. This could mean in 5 minutes or maybe in 5 years. A friend once told me it was one of the most annoying things about me, but I feel sure he left out several far more interesting options.

Meanwhile, another sort of parallel issue that ties into this epiphany has been going on. Since way-back-when -- we are talking end of 1995 now -- I've been regularly faced with the opportunity to make some money from something related to RV, and refused.

o0o MoneyMoneyMoneyMoney

For just over a couple of years, it was because of what I considered the 'honor of the sensei' -- which is to say, people would offer to come give me cash if I'd just spend a full day letting them pick my brain, and I had an infant and no real job and a husband that didn't work and I desperately needed it, but I felt that anybody worth teaching "should have a real teacher" -- that being one of the 'formal' instructors I knew and had studied with -- and I felt that it would also be unfair to the teachers to take money they should get.

This was a real drama queen martyr thing in retrospect, because the degree of my need, the casual one-off nature of the options, and the obscene amount of money that RV teachers were making off the public anyway, should have made all that angst a moot point. But no, get me on any kind of kick where I think any decision is about the 'honor' of something and you might as well give up, I'm ten times as stubborn. Sigh. Sometimes I think my character was written by John Irving -- it's like the kind of thing you've got to have a sense of humor and a penchant for sociology to appreciate.

TKR and the dojo's software developed, and the time demands put into it kept up. It's been reprogrammed and redesigned several times, and expanded continually. I've tried to keep a constant hand in TKR's communications, as much for the insanity it keeps out as a side effect, as for anything I might contribute. The amount of hours eventually 'averaged' to like 40 a week at least every other week -- evenings and into the night and all weekend generally, for eons. The amount of money I was spending just on that project alone, for server rentals, programming help at times, applets or software plugins on occasion, domain names, etc. -- not counting other things like Firedocs or many other RV domains that I maintain -- reached into the thousands of dollars.

My friends started really leaning on me about it. They thought it was insane and ridiculous that anybody would seem to basically dedicate their entire life outside work and kid to something and get no compensation for it -- their theory was that at the least, I should charge enough so I didn't have to do all that work for free AND pay for it. But making stuff available was the whole point of TKR, so I didn't care much. I made a decent income at my job, not great but enough that I could afford to fund it all with being dependent on anybody else. The politics and marketing media and business competition in the RV field, not counting disinformation, misinformation, mis-education (enough of that to span the globe several times), cult indoctrination and more made an island of sanity for RV -- a FREE one -- critical in my opinion. I wanted it open and out there.

o0o Donations and Drama

So then in the early days of TKR, the idea of a "donation" button was brought up. At first, I think I just refused, because I didn't want to feel beholden to others. I didn't want anybody to ever be able to say, "Hey, I donated money to you, how dare you let my name or opinion get dissed in your project?" I already had a rather surreal problem with one trainer thinking it was my moral duty to defend his reputation from the people he'd worked so hard to ruin it with, and the thought of that expanding to cover anybody who wanted to donate 20 bucks nearly gave me hives just thinking about it.

Eventually, when the topic came up again, and more people had commented to me about such things privately, I decided to consider it. But then I realized that this might not work. Due to marrying a foreigner who never got legal here and some related issues bigger than anything you want to hear about (trust me), I owe the IRS money. This means that if I had actual INCOME -- like, dependable income from a job or client -- they could (they do) levy it. I had this idea that they would hunt down every person who sent me five dollars and send them all my personal info and a 1/4" stack of paper with threats about what'd happen if they didn't fill it out. Which I might add they did to several of my clients long ago, which contributed to them not being clients and greatly complicated my paying the debt. (Brilliant, they are not.) So at that point I refused because I didn't know enough about it (now I know more) and I worried that debt might cause some problems if I took donations.

More time passed. More money... more working through the night... and the subject would come up now and again, usually in private correspondence. I would shrug it off. It's ok, I can handle it.

o0o

Recently, I dished out a few hundred for the first almost-half of the chatroom stuff. I was going to open it even with the limitations it had, stuff I hadn't bought yet for customizing, but it turns out these "emoticons" and "preset comments" and "avatars" in it are so incredibly stupid, it is just downright humiliating to even be associated with.

So with a sigh I realized it could be a few months before I had the money for the rest of it (so I could change them), given the way things are going in my life lately, and everyone would just have to wait. Yes, that meant I'd be paying monthly on a chatserver nobody used, but we're talking about my reputation being proxy to totally moronic media. That seemed more important. Apparently if I can't be cool I will take my ball and ... not chat.

So to my surprise, on the TKR board, the very next day (he must be psychic!) Daz asks for a chat room. I say sure, and explain it's sort of coming but has to wait on a bit more funds. And he suggests -- as has happened so many times before -- that I put up a donation button and let people donate to the project for it.

I wrote a message that I didn't post, that said, "No, it's ok. It'll be here eventually."

And then just before I clicked on the send button, it all hit me.

This is my conversation with myself, in personal vs. Devil's Advocate (DA) form.

o0o Inner Guide (DA) Gets Cheeky

DA: They can't donate why?

PJ: I don't need it.

DA: If you can't do what they want because you don't have the money, you need it.

PJ: I don't need to ask others for help.

DA: Woo woo. So this is about your ego? I thought it was about a chat room.

PJ: Well I can take care of it, it'll just take awhile.

DA: It's already been awhile. A LONG while. So what you're really saying is, "Only I, The Official Martyr(tm), can contribute to this project." Aren't you the one always talking about how it's the members that make the project what it is? And now you're saying you won't let the members help make it what they want it to be.... because why, again?

PJ: I don't want to make money off online RV. I've seen it corrupt every person it touches.

DA: Who said you're making money off it? At this point all the donations you'll ever get times 1,000 couldn't cover the amount of money and time you've been putting into RV stuff online since late 1995. You'll be lucky if once a year you get enough donations to cover a month of your overall RV online expenses. The expenses you pay aren't business expenses, they are personal. If someone pays part of that, it's a gift. It's a tiny drop in the bucket that might help. More importantly, it might help the members actually contribute to the things important to them. Something you say you want, in general.

PJ: Yeah but then some bonehead will be saying that I'm doing it for money.

DA: First, that's just too stupid to qualify, given everything you've put in the last dozen years. It would make them look bad more than you if they did. Second, this means that rather than basing your decisions on the many people in projects you're part of, or the people who most like you and want to help you or help the project, you're basing your decisions on some invisible, assumed person who doesn't like you and might say bad things about you. What kind of sense does that make? If anybody influences your decisions it should be your friends, not your enemies. Besides, your enemies already diss you, who cares if they add something else to their rants? Why should you care anyway? They're off your radar. Live your life.

PJ: I guess I just want to feel like I am not indebted and beholden to people.

DA: Then maybe you should build your next social club in a cave. Listen, you're the one always going on about how you only build the shell and the people are the heart and soul of it and it's their interests and input that drive it. It isn't about you being beholden. The point is, it isn't about YOU. Get over yourself already! Nobody is doing you a favor. Maybe a little, maybe IF they like you, but maybe it's a whole lot more about just wanting to feel like they're contributing to something they appreciate online. Maybe they only visit because of someone or something else and they can't stand you. That doesn't mean they don't appreciate the project. You're filtering everything as if it has to come through the doorway of your ego. Miss "I must be independent, and honorable!" That just doesn't really apply to donations. It might apply to you selling 1-900 RV services, or ranting about aliens and doom on late night radio, but a "donation to an RV project" is NOT a statement on your ego, morality, competence, independence, or anything else. Because it's not a statement about YOU, ok?

... I thought about this for awhile. The part that really bugs me about my inner voice (and I have pleaded, lately, for my Inner Guide to be more present in my conscious life, and I suspect this is his doing, as he is often making me see things about myself I don't want to see), is that it makes me realize what a totally conceited autocrat I can be sometimes.

So I didn't post the message and instead went back to work for a bit while I mulled it over. I started thinking about the talks my buddy and I have been having about the clutter in my house and what the archetype said about time, space, clutter and feng shui, and I suddenly realized:

o0o It's all connected.

All the crap I hang on to that I don't really "need" terribly, that causes clutter in my house; all the issues I won't let go of that cause me such resistance to ever "being vulnerable" or "letting someone help me" (because it would make me vulnerable -- the Narrator talked to me about that years ago) -- it's connected.

And I realized that what it amounts to, I am not "letting anything in" -- not just 'donations' but really, the whole larger picture of being "acceptive" of how reality interacts with me -- and I am also not "letting anything out" -- like the house which, despite being 1.7 billion times better now that my ex is gone, is still way too cluttered for my taste.

And then, in one of those perspective-switches that are so right they irk me, I remembered what my friend was saying about the clutter: that it's a poverty mentality, of course.

If you really trust you'll have what you need in life, you let things go, you let them find use with others, you don't hoard and store things that you never use or for really long periods of time. Everything around you, he reminded me, is literally a reminder ("an idea incarnate", I thought) of what you think you lack, of what you think you won't be able to get again when you need it.

Instead of being surrounded by plenty, what I am really surrounded by is monuments to lack.

DA: There's no FLOW. It's a fear-based response. It's a curled-up-in-shell-of-safety response. If you had faith in yourself, in your reality, if you could "ALLOW" -- the big issue for you -- you would let things flow from you, and flow to you as well, and it wouldn't be any big issue at all.

I wondered if that might relate to the extra body weight that is such a bother to get off me. Not allowing, not releasing, storing and hoarding. Kinda sounds like it huh.

I'm really sort of astounded by the insight. Not that being a bonehead is new to me, I realize this about myself regularly, but I found today particularly insightful, albeit in a bit of a bruising yet freeing way.

o0o Breaking The Habit

I've decided that I'm going to change that. I'm going to improve myself. I'm going to be more of the kind of person I want to be, and I'm going to reshape my life to make it happen.

So I came to two conclusions.

First. I am going through my house bit by bit and I am getting rid of everything that I do not use regularly and/or that is not so hard to acquire (or needed in emergency) that I can bear it.

My bathroom has like 15 towels. There are two of us. There's so many they end up all over the counter and floor, the stack toppling off the shelf. They are out of here shortly. I'll save the 4-5 that are big thick beach towels is all. I have a big wall cupboard and an oversized sink cabinet that are stuffed with stupid things I never use and probably 30 bottles of stuff. It's out of here. My chronically crowded, cluttered bathroom has enough storage space, given there's two of us, that it ought to be nearly zen minimalist. Really, this should be applied to my whole house.

Make it so! I will LET THINGS GO.

Second. I am going to make a page for donations on the dojo site, and put buttons on my various websites, and anybody who wants to donate can.

I'll let people spec out what project/thing it's for if they want, and I'll keep a public tally of everything in/out so folks know what it's really for. There is no excuse for acting like a martyr and there is no excuse for keeping viewers anywhere, let alone members of a member-driven project, from actually helping shape their project or viewing stuff online if they so choose. It shouldn't even be a big deal and it might be helpful to me AND to the projects.

Make it happen! I will LET THINGS IN.

And maybe, with a little more "energy flow" of incoming and outgoing and "allowing", I can better deal with the stored clutter in my house -- and on my body -- and maybe, just maybe, it might even have some feng shui reality side-effect on my available time. Which is as limited as -- surprise -- my available money at the moment.

It is actually hard. I feel all this inner resistance to both things. But I think this is what personal growth is all about, is about recognizing your limitations and proactively doing something to cure them and bring balance to yourself.

I'll put the donation page up tomorrow. For now, off to clean the house!

The Big RV Closet

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 28 February 2007

It's long been a bit of standing humor in the Remote Viewing field. You see, there's all these folks who allegedly would give "credence" to the various claims of public personalities, as soon as they appear (Real Soon Now). Or, who will help-redeem and demonstrate Remote Viewing itself, whether its methods or its numbers, by showing up just when we most need them.

Some refer to it as the Big RV Closet.

So every time someone referred to people -- seemingly legions of them, no less -- they had worked with in their insanely secret intell unit that wasn't of the projects now collectively called Star Gate, who would validate their sole and/or superior expertise, we were to understand that this was a reference to the Big RV Closet.

And, every time someone referred to their secret RV group who Real Soon Now was going to go public and change the world by showing 'em how it was done, we knew it was another link to the Big RV Closet.

***

Well, there are those of us who, no matter how gullible we might seem, have always rather hoped that the Big RV Closet was actually real. At the least, for the latter group of people: The "serious viewers working on their own privately."

Now I've run into a variety of groups over the last dozen years, and finding some that weren't cults or deluded or doing more to practice cold-reading and wishful-thinking than psi, has been easier said than done. But I am sure there are some. I pray there are some. Somewhere.

Knowing how many people have been trained in psi methods over the years, and how many have surely taught themselves, whether via videos or books or websites or whatever, it doesn't take a genius to observe that statistically, there just oughtta be more of us (doing more than talk) in the active "field" than there are.

So we hope, we hope A LOT, that a whole lot of other viewers we would surely relate to, are in fact in that Big RV Closet, and that one day they will come through for us, and prove to have been doing something useful all this time.

Not like RV doesn't have enough cargo cults as it is, but it's almost like we have another quiet one, too: all of us waiting for those secret people to come out of the dark and perform brilliantly at applications and help move the field forward someday... someday, they'll save RV from being quite so overwhelmed by lunatics and undersupported by hands-on viewing. Someday. Any Day Now.

While some of us were working the trenches to give RV a decent image for newbies and media, to welcome new people to something less insane than other options, to establish something longterm for the field, to build websites to help educate, archive and encourage information and, god forbid, actual viewing -- it is cheering to think that somewhere, someone not burdened with all that junk, folks who shrugged off the world at large to focus on themselves (a great idea many of us have certainly had more than once!), have just been viewing.

Please God. Let there be viewers.

Since they certainly aren't visible in any numbers, let them be in that Big RV Closet.

***

Following my post a few days ago (about The Invisible Majority -- or, the stupendous lack of people in the viewing field who are visibly viewing), I got quite a few emails. Well, a few were actually responding to a thread with similar content on TKR. I've had a few days to think about them, and I think I'd like to respond here, in general.

Some simply agreed with me, often with a lot more bite than I ever had about it!, so those I'll figure are covered.

A couple were from viewers I've known in the past who disappeared, for the most part. They told me, in essence, that they have each been working in a small private group for quite some time, that they are very serious about RV, and that they hope to come out of the closet eventually, and demonstrate what their work has brought them in skill. That is always cheering. It makes me feel relieved. Thanks for telling me. It does me no good and, at this time, RV no good, but it does give a shred of 'hope' that something might come of it. I appreciate that a lot.

Apparently, to varying degrees, they recognize that to those of us constantly facing the public, the slim-pickens of hands-on viewers working in-protocol in-public can be a little frustrating. Rather makes it seem like all the work put in -- and the number of hours we're talking about are pretty insane, over the years -- is nearly for nothing, if the result years later is a lack of increasing numbers.

I appreciate it when people care enough to say something. Even if it's just, "Hang in there. Everybody has their own part, we're working on ours, you're working on yours, and it'll all come together one day." Thanks for that.

***

In every subject of interest you'll find websites and more, created by people with a serious interest in the subject. It's human nature to want to support, in your own way, the larger subject, its field and people, and its information, especially when most of us waded through, directly or indirectly, a whole lot of information-chaos (if not outright mis/dis-information) to get to a better understanding.

It would be nice to think that our wading through the ridiculous BS this field has suffered over the years will, thanks to our efforts, educate more than just ourselves. It would be nice to think that as a result of such efforts, more people would learn about RV, more people would escape the anti-info about it out there, and the more people would eventually become decent viewers, good enough to handle applications, the one thing the field most needs.

But as we "move along," the years pass, and all the time, the lack of public viewing (in protocol I must add -- people viewing, even in the media, when someone standing a few feet from them knows the target, doesn't count, ok?!) -- it keeps coming back to focus again.

One person compared it to setting up tons of colleges specifically for engineering degrees, doing major publicity to get people into these engineering colleges, and from media to high school recruiting, making every biggest push toward getting people into engineering. And it works, and massive quantities of people go into engineering school. The tiny, underfunded, underactive engineering field waits with high hopes and excitement for that future. The population at large, with many folks interested, is encouraged for what this might bring to the people once they start graduating. And you do hear that lots of them did get degrees, tons of people.

But a dozen years later, there's still no engineers. There's no engineering going on anywhere that you see, except a couple independent efforts that already existed before that big drive to create engineers occurred. It would be perfectly reasonable for anybody -- especially someone truly interested in the field, and who cared deeply about its future -- to ask, "Where are all the engineers?!"

***

A couple folks had a different perspective.

I guess, if you do that in the same situation in RV, some people think you're "just trying to be political." I disagree. It doesn't take great emotion or angst to point out something you think is a problem. Cyclically, I gripe about this and move on. It's not like it dominates my life or something; it's just a super-obvious problem that anybody with a brain ought to be able to see, and only irrational denial would pretend isn't so. Even people I regularly debate about everything else will openly say the same thing; it's the one topic we agree on because it's the one thing that is the most painfully obvious in our field.

Why is it a big deal? Because applications is the #1 thing RV really needs. Everybody surely knows that. And applications requires viewers. Real viewers. Viewers who can work in a proper protocol. As long as the field continues to rake in millions for "training" related products and services, yet fails to result in publicly demonstrable viewers, this is going to be a problem. If people can't work in an apps group or in media, no problem; there are places online you can view in public. Every good session done in a proven protocol is a contribution to the larger field.

But a couple folks were really unhappy with me. It wasn't that the issue wasn't real. It was that I shouldn't have dared comment on it! Funny. Apparently we are supposed to let that gigantic a disconnect -from -reality keep happening, just as it has been happening for nearly a dozen years, and not notice, and not say anything. Like that Alcoholics Anonymous TV commercial that shows the bizarre dysfunctionality of the family: there is an elephant in the living room, and the kids are pretending not to see it; the mother is actually vacuuming around it; but nobody dares mentions it. You can bet, if one of those people said, "Hey! There's an elephant in the living room! What is wrong with this picture?!" that they would be the ones at fault for bringing it up. "Nobody else is complaining!" they might be told. "What difference does it make if there's an elephant taking up the entire living room? So what if you're one of the people in that room. What's it to you? What an ego you must have to think you have some right to complain!" Or, of course, "You're just trying to start a fight with the guy who let the elephant in! You're so negative! What's wrong with you?!" The idea that maybe the guy who let the elephant in should make some actual effort to do something about it, doesn't really get addressed, of course. That is the way of dysfunction. Family psychology dynamics don't just play out in families. They play out in any grouping of human beings, from the workplace to groups to whole 'fields' on the internet.

So in our engineering analogy, we are not supposed to go to the people promoting engineering in the media because they are selling it, we are not supposed to go to the engineering instructors at the college, we are not supposed to go to the groups or corps who provided the official engineering degrees, and ask them, "Excuse me... but where are all the engineers? Shouldn't we have a lot more bridges and buildings and stuff that would show us some sign of them? After all the time, the people, the money, the hype that have gone into creating all these tons and tons of engineers, doesn't it seem like at least the tiniest portion of them should be visible? Somewhere? Anywhere?"

Because you know, some people think such a thing would just be rude. How dare we question this. What incredible arrogance, to think that because we are IN the remote viewing field, that because we care about it, that because we care about its future, that we have some right to wonder, to ask that question.

***

Meanwhile, back in the closet, a grouchy murmuring comes from the dark. "You say there's no viewing visible in the field," they complain. "But here we are in the dark, and we're viewing! So you don't know! You don't know everything. You don't need to know. We are secret, but we're here, so why do you leave us out? You just assume only what you know of exists, apparently!"

Well gosh, that's sort of obvious isn't it? If something is invisible and unknown, there is no reason to 'assume' on it.

If Jane chooses to be secretive, and to hide in that Big RV Closet, doesn't participate publicly, doesn't view publicly, then NEWS FLASH: Jane is not "part of the field." What Jane's viewers are "part of" is the closet.

The idea of a 'field' of people is that in some way, they are interacting with each other, and they are contributing to a larger population and public-subject.

I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to tell the whole public aspect of the RV subject to stuff it, and go live in a closet of my own, where all the time I had could be dedicated just to me. I don't knock anybody who chooses to work privately. I don't pretend I don't understand the why, sometimes. I don't invalidate them. I expect that this would be a norm in fact -- it's simply that after a dozen years, I would expect some of those private groups to have turned up in public finally!

I don't have anything to say about them at all usually, because why should I? They are not part of the RV field by their own choice, so they are simply not applicable to the subject until that changes. I cannot recognize them as "part of the field" until they actually choose to become part of the field. That is their decision, not mine.

It ought to be evident that if someone chooses to be 'secret and hidden', that it's pretty ludicrous for them to get mad at someone else for not knowing about them, or for not 'assuming' they exist when there is no visible evidence of it. If someone in the public field fails to include them and their allegedly brilliant secret viewing, for them to be offended they got left out -- well, I think that might actually be too stupid even to address, but I felt I should cover all the emails not just some.

***

Why should I assume legions of great viewers exist in the closet? What evidence might there be for that assumption? Some Pollyanna-like wishful thinking? I have some of that. Not quite enough to cover an entire field of assumption, though. At this point there's more evidence for fairies than serious in-protocol viewers.

Those of us who deal with the public daily, with new viewers daily, with the push for getting people into "hands-on viewing" and not just talking about it indefinitely, want to believe. We have the utmost hope for the future of RV. We have reason to care about the subject, about its future. We wouldn't be spending ridiculous amounts of our personal time, some for many, many years now, to promote and educate and inform and encourage remote viewing in the world, if we didn't care about it. Of course its future is important to us. Of course its severe shortage of "viewers in public" -- actually viewing, in protocol -- is going to be concerning. There would be something weird if it didn't concern us, if we didn't care.

It isn't about politics, or personal dislike, or X vs. Y vs. Z methods, or some unchecked egomaniacal personality disorder (great quote). It's really pretty simple. Anybody with a brain has got to recognize this lack of public viewers as a factual issue.

The difference seems to be whether or not people are "concerned about it."

***

Apparently, a couple folks think anybody concerned about it must have some overwrought personal problem causing this "observation of concern." Sure. Why am I not surprised. People doing jack for the larger field of RV have no reason to care. What's it to them? It's not their hours, their life, their free work, their efforts, put toward a positive outcome. In short, since they have so little vested in the subject, why should they care?

But in my view, there are some people including me, who would really like to take their ball and go home -- and focus solely on their personal aims. But when there is so much insanity reigning in the field, and such a limited number of sources supporting sanity, and an even more severely limited number of sources supporting hands-on viewer development -- it seems a lot more like abandonment than simply changing focus.

If there were more active viewers, if there were more people carrying the field, not by claims-and-sales but by actual viewing, it wouldn't feel like such a pitiful situation. It wouldn't feel so much like RV needs support, and defense, and constant pushing for hands-on work. It wouldn't feel like an obligation to sacrifice personal time and energy and sleep to support this online field because there is so little "real" available it seems like it's got to have someone helping. RV at large would feel like it had its own momentum and didn't need to be pushed uphill.

But that hasn't happened yet. And no, it doesn't count if it's happening in secret where it's not doing anything but them or their little clique any good. It won't count until it actually contributes to the overall field of RV.

***

For those who work in private and seriously intend to do something useful with that one day, more power to you. I totally support that. Here's hoping you can "come forward" prior to some bozo screwing with training students gets sued and ends up making half the field illegal with some overzealous follow-on legislation. Here's hoping you can come forward sooner rather than later and apply RV to any kind of applications.

I support ANY kind of hands-on RV done in protocol. (Since working out of protocol does more to harm RV than help it, as all our Comet-borne Pathogen-In-A-Can bad memories remind us.) I support any group, of any method, or any perspective on RV, that is doing actual hands-on RV in protocol, without it being some new mercenary sales effort geared to all the vulnerable newbies who want to be omniscient.

I would and will support that in any way I can.

***

For those who work in private and will probably never end up doing something constructive in public... I guess I just don't care. My priorities haven't shifted in a dozen years in RV, although my vision of what supports them have. I support RV. Real RV. Hands-on RV. Legitimate information, useful education, productive opportunities for people learning, and practical applications for the Art. People, groups, media, and information, either fit into that definition, or they do not. As long as they do not, they are off my radar. To the degree or "spots" where they do not, they are outside my interest. When those folks in the Big RV Closet choose to be useful to someone besides themselves, when they choose to become a part of "the field" in public, then we will all know of them, and they will not be "excluded" from blogging editorials or forum commentaries that rightfully assume their nonexistence.

***

We're still waiting for more than a handful of people to view in a public protocol. Especially those experts.

Twelve years now.

Ever the patient,
PJ

What is The Matrix? A Primer.

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 25 February 2007

I found this ancient post I'd made one day on TKR and thought I should've blogged it instead. Better late than never.

Remote Viewing has a lot of terminology, but one of the most famous terms is THE MATRIX.

What is The Matrix?

It's God's Database, see, and you provide your target#, which has been psychically double-bound to your target like velcro duct tape within the matrix, via the tasker (by a process so confidential we'd have to shoot you if we told you, but bear in mind it's illegal in 18 states and the UK and especially offensive to those of marvian Advanced Moral Standing).

Your target# as written on paper is rewritten into MSQL (Matrixian Structured Query Language, pronounced "pray" for short), and rendered in order of submission sequence to the quantum asynaptical process unit. The queuing process goes something like this:

{in a lovely, automated, sexy female Jetsons-like voice:}
Welcome to the Matrix Universal Akashic Repository System.
Please listen to our menu, as our options have changed!
Para habla guadacanal, kanji Brie.
For wandering blindly in the dark, please press 1.
For staring at the paper until your eyes water, please press 2.
For rolling excitedly through an amazing session that has no relation to your target, please press 3.
For small obscure furled-pieces of universally archetypal symbols condensed into the names of flowers, press 4.
To hear this menu again, please press the triangle button.
To exit this sytem without commitment, please say "Zzzzzzzz".

HENCE your query finally makes sense to the Matrix, which is not to say it's the correct question to begin with of course, but WHEREAS prayers don't fit into a database any better than "soon" or "eventually" fit into date fields on spreadsheets, it is necessary that some basic coding and tweaking go on invisibly in the background---I'm sure you understand. At which point, having been de-rendered back into its original meaning before your puny little brain distorted it, the Matrix is asked:

SELECT * FROM MY_UNIVERSE
WHERE BEATPATTERN IN (0,1) AND
(PROBABILITY = 'YES' AND GULLIBILITY > 0) AND
TARGETID = 1983^12E8Z.123879ZZ123.67841-Q AND
(FOCUS LIKE '%USEFUL OR DESCRIPTIVE%' OR
FOCUS IN ('LOST IN SPACE','OFF ON MARS'))
GROUP BY 'C-S-T-Q-M-RV STAGE'
ORDER BY STRUCTUREPOINT

Finally after all that laborious work that is invisible to you (so now you know how amazing the universe truly is), the Matrix processes your MSQL request, and gives you back a response which can vary widely, such as

Exception 5200.718: Failure to complete socket.

You will know when you get this message by the way you realize you've been sitting there for 10 minutes with your eyes glazed over and there's nothing on paper. Or:

Exception 198201.123: String Truncation Error

Which means that unbeknownst to you (since you're double blind when viewing), you tried to ask a complex question such as "what is the psychological state of the target individual on June 16, 1982, at 1:00PM," but the input was so oversized that it cannot be processed, and/or you hope it can't be, because if it is, the Matrix will be required to give you a highly abbreviated, condensed but 100% totally accurate answer like:

Gouda.

And as you well know, without the Mondo Super Psychic Demon Decryption Ring Of Darkness -- which costs more than money, if ya know what I mean -- you will not be able to "unfurl" this decrypted message. Alternatively, the Matrix may return a message such as:

Exception 1237.19 Queryparam invalid binding

which as everyone knows, means that your tasker failed to do the proper left-ankle massage prior to meditating and/or only meditated for 14.5 minutes instead of the full 15 when binding your task# to the target in the Matrix, setting up a whole slew of cascade failures that you cannot possibly be held responsible for as a viewer. Should you have any session that fails to reveal sufficient omniscience (which method Q^Z-RV totally ensures), you can be certain that somewhere along the line, it is all the tasker's fault.

(Should you be unable to blame the tasker for social reasons, simply note that your task ID consists of characters which have surely seen each other before at some point in the history of time, and you are totally accurate about what you perceived, but it makes perfect sense that you are perceiving a metallic mold from a donut shop in Pompeii rather than the target of today. I mean, time has no meaning, and someone else obviously already used that number, so what can be expected?)

But of course those are only occasional glitches, and usually the Matrix is much more forthcoming. At double the speed of light, dating back in time to before the tasker was even conceived of by their ancestors, the answer to your query will be beamed into your local universe. You will know this has happened because:

a - the squirrels aka tree rats in your backyard will immediately begin discussing the more profound implications of childhood Eriksonian autonomy phase interruption and how this has clearly affected the psychology of your target. Your inability to understand a perfectly clear conversation as anything more than "squeak squish chirp click" is of course your responsibility, not the Matrix's.

b - your hand will make a small, slightly complex, irregular, completely indecipherable scribble on your page known as "scribblograms", an advanced technology used by many but first explored by Fred "The Toad", viewer par exquisiscribbloinaire, a Guam researcher who wrote all about this last millennia, on the charming but politically cranially-recursive land of laSheba Oui. Every aspect of the question your task posed, including symbolic, allegorical, circumstantial, relational, conceptual, and descriptive, will be encompassed in this scribble, as well as the individual's medical profile, FBI file contents, and his thoughts about lunch that day.

If this is not perfectly obvious when seeing the scribble -- right there plain as day in front of you, after all, sheesh -- it is simply that you have spent an insufficient amount of time practicing that scribblogram in different sized little boxes, and/or you have clearly not been working with the Buchanabilly Ultra Audio Matrixian Scribbliomatic Generator, which all serious viewers really ought to have. (Will someone nice please share a modern copy with me because my version dates from 1912 and worked well on my abacus but does not work on Windows XP.)

Should this not resolve your decryption woes, I recommend you purchase all 17 DVDs for Stage 81.29B, which specifically deal with this issue, as presented by Corporal I.M. Ferengi, who trains bylliuns and bylliuns of viewers to be better than anything the government ever had, all of which would be predicting major world events months in advance within a +/- 10 second range, except that unfortunately they are all busy laboring on the supersecret Cheese Of Doom project under Mount Baldy, so not even one of them is available for demonstrable public examples. I'm sure anybody reasonable would understand. I mean we're talking the CHEESE of DOOM here people. Get your priorities straight.

Please bear in mind that the asynaptic quantumly connected triple-redundant consciousness loop between you and the Matrix is subject to the slightest shift of attention during your process. Your answer may change literally as you get it, if you lose clarity of focus during the process. If this should occur, I recommend the cartoon poster of the infamous I.M.F. as well as the full CD-ROM package of stage 166.5 (version IV of that module) which has inspired several underpaid customer service representatives of the CD mfg & sales company to come onto I.M.F.'s website under 412 names each and wax poetic about its amazing effectiveness.

Should you have any further questions regarding the Matrix, look for my 872-page hardbound book "Brief Readings Regarding the Scribbliograms of Time," in which I go into this subject and make several predictions of the future, including the year 2021 alien-cloning of George Z. Bush the 6th (May He Live Forever) (which btw I predict will be a total failure, since clearly, his ancestors were Replacements to begin with, and you know what a 6th generation copy looks like! all crooked and fuzzy!). I even reveal secrets about daily life in the year 4914, when 3000 years of "etcetera" will have left us with a polite little Earth Society of 214 people living in domes. (Don't ask what happened to everybody else.)

The Five and Dive

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 22 February 2007

One of the basics about Learning Theory and the issue of feedback is that the closer the feedback is to the actual action and/or perception, the more educational the feedback is likely to be.

In Remote Viewing, the perception is often ridiculously tenuous, subtle, approximated, associated, and all sorts of other feelings-inside that make a good session as exciting as the constant challenge-thrill-swoosh of surfing, and a bad session like some version of pulling psychic teeth that is memorable only for its degree of misery.

One of the biggest problems with remote viewing practice is that if you don't spend enough time on the session, you may not get much data or much "depth" of data. On the other hand, the more time you spend on the session, the bigger a disaster it is when it's a bad session or off target, and the more time you've just lost to it. Most viewers are adults and work for a living. They don't have a ton of time. So, if it takes you 1.5-3 hours to do a session, obviously you aren't going to do very many per week, or if you do, you certainly aren't going to have time to do anything else with your life!

But there's another issue. Remember how not just tenuous, but FAST psi data often flies past. How subtle it can be. How-- well, many things that there aren't even words to describe.

In order for feedback to be clear, you need to be able to remember how things felt. The longer your session, the more experience, and the less clear some of that experience might be.

And equally important, you need to have some idea how the 'feeling' you got, compared to the data you wrote, and compared to the actual feedback for that point. The more data points you have in a session, and the more data points are in a given target, the less clear it is going to be exactly what-is-what in your data compared to session.

***

A recurring amazement RV gives me, is how there seem to be a limited number of "core forms and dynamics" in our reality, they simply have infinite variation. It is just astonishing how, even if you described a specific thing targeted to you exactly, how many other things in reality would be decently described in the same way. Sometimes, for a given data point, several things in the target could theoretically be the reason for that data. In order for feedback to educate you, you need to know WHAT data in the target your session is trying to describe.

Simplifying the targets is one obvious way to approach this, which is one reason why the phrase "basic targets" equates to the term "training targets" in layman's RV. Shortening the sessions is another way to approach it.

Since practice in a doubleblind with feedback is the #1 most important thing to developing viewer skill, anything that reduces either the value of practice or the amount of on-target practice you get in, is a major issue. If you can only do one session a day, and you have to give up your whole block of personal spare time for that three hour session, chances are viewing is going to be a lot more work for you than some others.

I think sometimes doing long, in depth sessions is important. But I also think that doing basically 10-15 minute "session exercises" is very important -- because if you don't succeed, you have time to do another, so you can "quit on a high," so you can be sure that you are 'succeeding with RV' every day.

And what about those days when you just don't have even for-sure 15 minutes?

Then do the Dive in 5. If you have a friend, do it as a tandem in the dojo, that's fun, when others are viewing the same target with you. If not, just do it alone. Grab an envelope from your pool, your number from your tasker, your task from taskerbot, your task from the viewer studios, or from any other online target source, and just DIVE.

You have X minutes (however many you allot for the exercise) to get as much data as well as you can and as fast as you can. Tell your mind, "No dirking around for an hour here, no waiting and waiting for data -- it's already in me, I know this, so GIVE it to me!" When your time is up, your time is up. Work on forcing yourself to feel the sense of urgency about it -- and disappointment when you couldn't get more into the timeframe.

I half-promise -- at the least, this totally works for ME, and I have seen it work for others -- that if you start setting out exercise periods of 5-15 minutes, and really focusing hard on the session when you do one, that if you had any issues with data taking a long time to come in, it'll start solving itself. You may likely start getting data the instant you focus on the task# and open to it.

And every time you 'dive', you are practicing:

* Connecting to yourself for info
* Allowing it come through -- fast
* Processing it through you
* Recording the information
* Getting feedback
and, given the briefer period of session time, likely remembering a lot more of the actual session-experience for optimal feedback application to your experience.

It's better to do two five minute sessions a day than NO sessions. The psyche hammering of constant in-protocol viewing keeps that belief system door open, that "fluency of allowing it".

I've done sessions in 60 seconds that had a surprising amount of decent data -- and usually my only problem was that I didn't have time to write down everything I actually got in my head during that time, and was sorry when I saw how much of it was good stuff but didn't get written down.

But the moral of the post is that there is no reason why a lack of time should have to hinder viewing, or why you should have to give up your entire personal life to do one session a day, work for a living, sleep, etc.

The Amazing Mystery of the Invisible Majority

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 21 February 2007

The TKR Project was created at a time-point when methods people seemed at war with one another, the social politics of personalities were so bad that even humor couldn't be used, and the exclusionary nature of this vs. that version of psi methodology used for RV created chaos. Someone using a method like TDS, should they dare say something in public, was likely to end up in a fight about how someone disliked their trainer, rather than any intelligent conversation about viewing. It was impossible. I would say, please can't we focus on the subject not the person? And those defending the person disliked me for not defending them, and those against the person disliked me for not attacking them, and nobody (as usual) wanted to talk about actual RV.

I felt, and still feel, that the entire field/subject of RV was fragile and under threat. From fraud and marketing revisions to actual government disinformation. It would only take a couple high profile lawsuits to get a law made against selling training. Hypnosis for example has come insanely close to being legislated out of the hands of any but PhDs more than once, and were it not for PhDs with a lot of clout fighting to keep it more free, it'd be a done deal. RV has a whole lot less to support it should any legal threat arise. And I suspect if the gov't wanted that threat to arise and spawn legislation or law, it would. Maybe it hasn't simply because as a field we haven't yet seemed altogether competent enough to be a genuine danger to all the secrets some sources want to keep. Eventually we will though, and what then? If we are still a field of a bunch of individuals in chaos; if we are still a field that is 99.9% focused on money-based drives and only .1% on actual hands-on viewing, our field will be very, very easy to kill.

Far more powerful, more public, more funded, more media famous, more credential'd-expert fields have vanished from the map of knowledge over the last century. It is my intent that RV not go this way. I document history and make archives, I try to promote current participation and create archives, and I work to keep a focus on hands-on viewing, as well as on all-viewers-integration, because I believe these are the things that are the most strength for RV as a field and subject. I don't want to see history totally revised, the field suppressed or twisted, and its future marginalized if not nearly extinguished by the issues against it. The only thing that bothers me is how many people allegedly care about RV but seem to have utterly zero drive to do anything proactive in its favor.

The nature of RV's current reality is that nearly the only thing driving the 'field' forward is money, and here and there a little ego-altruism: yet the minute "corporatism and cash" become the only real "driving" motives in a field (let alone ego), truth and reality and historical accuracy are a thing of the past. The field was founded on science, but due to lack of funding, the layman's quarter is really the only thing moving much. It's a tragedy. But the strength of a field, like online archives, is built on the conglomerate, cumulative input of many. If even a very small percentage of those many would make the effort to do whatever they feel supports the larger field -- anything -- the field as a whole would be vastly stronger.

***

So the TKR project was created to bring people together. To let CRV and TRV and SRV and TDS and HRVG and psychics and video-trained viewers and book- or web- trained viewers and self trained viewers hang out in one place, as if they were people who had something in common, which they are. Like the old fable about the sons and the bundle of sticks, there is strength in numbers.

People can hang out there and still think their method is the way, the truth and the light, and still think that everybody with XRV is a deluded incompetent fool, but chances are if they actually *did* hang out there and view and look at sessions, they would gradually be forced to recognize that anybody serious about RV deserves some respect for it, that most all the methods can produce good data, etc.

The Galleries was something I figured would let every method demonstrate what it was best configured for. This is, in a layman's sense, though not scientific, still great research. Anybody right now can go look at a ton of sessions done on the same target, by many people, in many methods, sometimes more than one session on the same target, and can actually SEE how things come through, what varies by method, and what targets so often come through well (the fireworks at the olympics) vs. come through badly (the volcanic mud cauldron). When we see that, it's not an 'answer' without real science, but is it not a lot more education than we as laymen had before? Sure, "that's been studied", all the money and years of research that most of us will never see more than a few old white papers about; 95%+ of it will never be known to us. We will learn on our own if we will at all; nobody is going to help us. That's just one example. Getting people together to view can provide a whole lot of education to onlooking viewers.

In terms of differences in methods, some of what we see is apparent, of course; task a formal-method person with anything nebulous and they'll get physical symbology all through the session instead of literal data, because the target isn't literal, and the method is designed for things literal. The psychics however might be able to tell you about it. On the other hand, the psychics often have only a few lines of info (though it may be brilliant) on a target, and they may only be able to do that 1 in 5 or 1 in 20 times; whereas part of the side-point of the methods was to build in more consistency, and the common structure combined with a great deal more data (and of specific types usually) is often better suited to certain approaches to tasking, not to mention evaluation. I happen to think both have a strength, and that a good tasker, a good team, could utilize people with different methods and strengths in a positive way.

Some methods are more internal (visualizing components), while some are solely external. Some are altered state and some are not. I believed that if we had viewers of many methods working tasks, over time, we would be able to compare. Not that any viewer represents their method; but that generalities like I mention above start to become more clear when you get a bulk of things together. And people might eventually consider trying what they saw done, getting more educated.

I think curiosity is natural. I trained in CRV, and then I trained with graduate students in TRV and SRV, and I even spent awhile working in the free public docs put out for TDS, and I've waded through the regular and advanced HRVG manuals, as well as pieces of Silva, Scientology, occult disciplines, etc. (And now, years later, I'm lucky to remember any of them very well LOL.) I think everything is interesting. Bringing people together often provides more "cross cultural" and "inter- disciplinary" minds.

And I think some frameworks are better for some people than others, and it might have more to do with the people than with the framework. Or as we said in the TKR statement of intent when we opened the project:

TKR's Formal Founding Intent

There are many roads to personal and psychic development, and every individual chooses their own. Some roads are more appropriate for a given person, and this might have little to do with the road and much to do with the person. It is the right (and even spiritual obligation) of every person to get as clear a view as they can of the road(s) they might wish to walk, and to set forth in whatever direction and manner they choose.

In a subject so wide it applies to the innate faculties of every human being, there's room for many roads to lead to the same goal, without any crowding more hazardous than highly spirited competition. The evolution and strength of the field of Remote Viewing is of value to the human race: the information and communion provides important roads to the development of us as persons and as a species. The Remote Viewing field faces many challenges, and some are severe. The more community the field can muster, despite diversity, the better (and longer) the field can be of service to and for our people.

The Ten Thousand Roads (TKR) Remote Viewing and Dowsing project has something for everybody. TKR charges nothing, pays all server and traffic costs, handles all software issues, and staffs the online areas. Our staff represents many Remote Viewing methods and affiliations, to provide balance and fairness to all. This includes at various times TRV, SRV, CRV, HRVG, ERV, TDS, self-trained, un-trained, natural 'psychics', all interested and involved at least peripherally in the Remote Viewing or dowsing fields.

This project might allow more inter-disciplinary understanding, from having in one place (separate yet near) different perspectives. This could be a good thing. How much the potential is fulfilled will be up to those who participate, of course. Come play!

Intending the best! July 4, 2003.

I thought if people talked together and played together, there might be some friction, but gradually the field at large would be stronger for it, because people would see what the others could do and realize there was reason for that.

***

It sort of altered my plans that most of the "warring factions" never showed up at all. Instead, their conspicuous absence led to a much higher ratio in the project of internal method, altered state method, and unstructured method, viewers. I defended and built-in their right to be there too, as long as they would work inside an RV protocol, but it goes without saying that since my background is the methods world, and the vast majority of the field online is made up of methods-trained people, I expected the dominant viewing to be of that. But I've been unable to budge people to participate.

When I do get someone to give me any reason, I hear things like, "__[insert trainer name]__ doesn't want us to view there, because __[insert amazing amounts of often hilariously (or infuriatingly) untrue gossip here]___". Which makes me feel like it's a conflict of interest between making money vs. supporting RV, on the part of someone who'd do that, since they aren't offering the same tools to their viewers as an option, and it rather seems like the biggest resistance is either that the viewers will be abysmal and hurt their income by being a bad example to others, or the viewers will see others doing well with a different method (or no method) which will hurt their income by sending them to different trainers or no trainers for all the next- course levels and options and so on. And maybe the people who say that are not telling the truth, although I sort of doubt this as a few of them I've known for years.

But in the end, if even a fraction of that is true, it only hurts RV at large, by diminishing the strength of the community, attempts to withhold support from the most proactive and time/money-invested free offering resource the field has (though I think IRVA could rightly claim equal effort at the least), definitely does not help viewers, who only benefit from practice (and the formal method schools of thought have been using target pools for eons so that should be no issue) and since more viewers are semi-'alone with it' than not, that's really important. And all that why... because it isn't their particular niche, it doesn't make them money, it doesn't set them in stone as the only/ primary expert? I don't know why, maybe that is not the reason, that is just all my imagination can come up with, given the circumstance. Maybe it is unkind of me or even paranoid of me to imagine that is the reason. But since nobody is giving me any other explanation that sounds fair concerning the reasons, I'm forced to guess.

I ask people. All the time! Aside from that, which is rare but occasionally the response, I don't get any reasons. "Why does the group of people claiming the most expertise avoid demonstration of anything?" It's like a great mystery of RV.

And after awhile, over time, it does rather irk me. My occasional attitude on TKR stems from that.

Understand I built a project just for CRV in 1997. Paul and Joe and Gene and Greg as I recall were on the private message board willing to answer more in-depth personal viewer questions; that was very kind of them. And almost nobody came. Let alone viewed actively enough to have questions for them. Pointedly because the primary trainer I built it at the encouraged-behest-of, for personal-politic reasons, refused to tell anybody it existed, even when asked point blank. (Despite many people who told me they actually bought training after he told them about the great internet follow-up available--which back then, was only that.) I spent a huge amount of time and money on it, while working and raising a toddler, and I resented, a lot, the effort put in, and the life I gave up from my time and my kids' time, for nothing.

The old VWR list was the outreach arm of that project, but that's all people remember, thanks to stupid amounts of time spent making its archives. So you see it's not just a modern day issue. I have a history with building things just to support methods viewers and nobody bothering to view, to show up, to even do so out of nothing more than a minimal effort to support a good resource for the field at large.

Years later I built TKR. This time it's for everybody, not just CRV. And guess what. Again, CRV - and as a helluva coincidence, the other methods based on the original CRV -- won't show up and pointedly WILL NOT VIEW.

Good thing I invited everybody from any viewing direction, or me and the staff would still be sitting there alone.

Tunde (CRV and TDS), Daz (CRV and SRV), Josh (TRV), Dave (TDS) and Marv (CRV) are the primary methods viewers "that I know about" who are actively viewing online in a way that at least once in awhile, someone else besides some teeeny private group sees -- and all of them are gonzo on proper protocol, which is a blessed relief. There may be more in the galleries that just enter a summary or some data from a paper session of course (I know of probably two dozen other galleries viewers who were *trained* in a formal method, I just don't know that they use it; they don't seem to, or they are very sparse with the data they share.).

I don't know more than a tiny fraction of the people in the dojo, so it's hard to say. Frankly I keep wondering where the heck they are all coming from, since I honestly thought that around 400-500max was the whole field. There's over 4,300 registrations now. Some of them are bound to be duplicates. But still.

At this point, far more of the methods-trained field has never heard of me than knows me, so I can't even take the fact that they don't view in protocol publicly in any way personally (as if every single person from every single method is avoiding every single public opportunity to view that my projects sponsor, all because I am so evil. Of course, zillions will go drool on Ed Dames and hand over money to better-learn how we're all gonna die... again. Go figure). Even if there was a hefty dose of that it couldn't be the only reason. In part because this problem of apparent-non-viewing dates back to the 90's, when the 700-1000 emails in my box average per week suggested that a whole lot of people knew me and had nothing against me. (That was before I questioned the method, the trainers, and made an even-bigger deal of insisting that 'all methods' be included in things, at which point I got emails like, "You've betrayed your own!!" and I assume my public charm was pretty well lost.)

I could understand some, even most, people saying "I prefer to view alone" or "only with my friends" or whatever. In fact I would *expect* that. That's one reason that TKR has "offsite" tasking/viewing tools -- to support people working OUTside the project, with nifty tools nobody else could afford to build. But not the overwhelming percentage of people we are talking about here.

Maybe I should quit expecting groups of people who call themselves viewers to view enough that at least a teeeeeeny fractional % of them would end up, sometimes, with in-protocol sessions seen by others. Maybe the bizarre invisibility of methods viewers working in protocol publicly is for some deep dark secretive reason that nobody has ever figured out, which has nothing whatsoever to do with insecurity -- which I call cowardice but then Daz beats me up for that and he's a black belt, so, let's just stick with "insecurity" shall we. Maybe I have it all wrong. I might. I sure hope so. And for years now I keep waiting for someone to give me some more reasonable explanation.

Any time now.

Presentation Sessions

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 05 July 2006

I'd like to blog a bit more about the idea, function and purpose of what I call remote viewing "presentation sessions."

First, let's point out that the concept on its own isn't novel. In CRV and its various method derivatives, the session summary at the end of the session is, depending on your trainer and/or method, a "light" form of this. Some trainers request it simply summarize the data in the session. Others, allowing that at the end of the session when the summary is done the viewer is assumed to be in "better target contact," will let the viewer emphasize or de-emphasize information from the session, when doing the summary. This ranges, depending on the trainer, in degree: some let you actually "add and remove" data as well. However, it is still just a summary---it is paragraph form. It's a small thing tacked onto the end of the session.

A presentation session is a whole second psi-based product. I believe that in theory; perhaps if done well, if this itself became a skill; this product could be an improvement on the raw session (additional information, and better understanding of what info we already have).

Sharing Data with non-viewers: Session Issues

The people most likely to use RV data aren't viewers, but people asking them for sessions. Unless it's an RV project manager, these are the people least likely to know how to deal with the data as presented. On the internet, most session-sharing is done with the public.

There are a number of "issues" with raw remote viewing sessions when it comes to them being comprehensible for the public. The TKR Galleries have actually demonstrated some of these quite well, although anybody who works with a lot of other viewers would see them.

Novice Issues

For beginners, there are the primary problems of AOLs and focus. Let's take Jane, a new viewer, as example. It does not matter whether she is trained in a formal method or not; the basics, you can hear/learn even online. Jane has been taught that she is supposed to write down everything that goes through her mind during the session process. She dutifully writes down everything. This results in a session that is quite a bit not about the target, in part because Jane's mind is wandering like crazy, but also because Jane is still new to RV, so she really doesn't have a grasp yet on what is so fleeting that it's just unavoidable association (if we recorded every instance of that, it would be an endless word-association essay, not an RV session), vs. nebulous but still clear enough to count as data or at least AOL.

Also, Jane may be recording her process like a diary (and that's ok), and if she is formally trained so she's even got admonitions and acronyms to track every possible annoyance or event in her internal or external environments. When they get to the point of adding in all their active-AOL process ("...blue, blue-grey, or is it green? maybe tan. I don't know. My sister just turned on the radio. It's really hot in here. I think it's brown actually. But then I guessed brown on the last session and was wrong... ok, I'll say blue. Hard. Shiny...") I want to bellow, JUST THE FACTS MA'AM! People reviewing sessions don't want to know the viewer had an itch. They want to know about the target. Getting all that junk out of the way of what is presented can be good.

Then there is the issue that sometimes (especially method-trained new viewers) they AOL every damn thing---down to outright word-association strings---and even AOL half their actual data in their insecurity and fear of being wrong. This tends to result in viewers who, if the AOL is accurate, want to take credit for having hit on something, but if it's inaccurate, they figure it doesn't count because it's AOL. Analytical overlay is in my view poorly misunderstood by many viewers in the field at large, and ends up with some simplistic cookie-cutter definition that might be helpful for a brief time just in the door, but after that is silly if not detrimental in its shallow interpretation.

So, between the three things above, a new viewer's session can end up with a ton of stuff that is confusing, distracting or diffusing in their "raw" session. Learning to go through that and make a "clean version" has several educational benefits.

Other Issues

For more developed viewers, there are the primary issues of personal process and structured method.

For the method part of it, unless today I want to know more about CRV, I just don't really care what they got in their long strings of stage 2's or their matrix of stage 4 or whatever. What I really want to know is, "Tell me about the target." Because THEY are the expert at their method, they are far better equipped to package that information for "public perusal" than the public at large is. I find it a pain to wade through handwritten columns on a ton of pages. Also, some session methods are so complicated that nobody who isn't extensively trained in them could really make sense of them, and some even have some pages never shown in public sessions (as 'method secrets' or 'working pages'). Seeing the original "raw data" can be confusing, or can even be incomplete to begin with in the latter case. A readable summary of the data, and the various sketches, is far more ideal as an end-product.

I realize that this process may leave out some data, if the viewer doesn't feel, during the presentation session process, that 17 variations on the word "bright" really matter. If there are four pages of descriptives, my god, please don't tell me---for reference, great to have, but for the main presentation, I want to know what is "important and relevent" about the target, not every possible microscopically accurate piece of information that could conceivably be applied to it. (As McMoneagle once said, Some viewers will provide pages of descriptive information that covers the details of a leather jacket and its zipper that the person in the target were wearing, and it's "100% accurate!"; but really, what might be important is, "There is a man with a gun in his hand.")

It isn't that I am not interested in the raw data; depending on the viewer and session, sometimes I really am. It's just that as far as public presentations go, I would like the viewer to be the one who, after the session-proper, provides the information in a readable format that at least partly makes sense to the average reader. Only the viewer is in the position to judge what is "most important and relevent" about a target---that's the psi! But when you begin a session, you're likely to get a little bit of everything. The viewer, at the end of the session when their target contact is better developed, can go back through the session and have a better feel for what really matters, what deserves emphasis, vs. what doesn't. Same as with some method variants on the summary, except I'm talking about literally a whole reiteration-with-possible-revision of the session itself. Might they be wrong? Heck yeah! But learning to be right about this is what RV comes down to.

This is not analysis in session because it isn't being done in session; it is a second psychic product that is based on the viewer's own psi evaluation (the session-part-2) of the raw data (session-part-1). Done before feedback obviously; ideally, is done following the session, as an "extension" of it.

Personal Process

The other issue is personal process. First there is the psi process itself. I sometimes write down not just the data I get, but HOW I got the data. I have a ton of personal acronyms I use for things in some sessions that would not be understood by anybody else, and I don't see why I should have to educate the whole world on my method in order to be able to have my viewing data understood. Allegedly, we the viewers are the experts on viewing (heh), and if anybody ought to be arranging a "presentation understandable to the public" of data, it oughtta be the viewer.

There are many different "kinds" of visuals, or ways to get them. There is even more than one way to "hear" stuff. Then there's mini-movies as I call them, and seeming bi-lo moments, and in-body feelings, and ghost-body feelings, and thoughtballs, and so on. "How" I interpret something is going to depend, often, on how it comes across. I can tell you that if I see something with a "stark clarity that is realer than real" for a moment, it's usually the target. Not just like the target. THE target. (For me this is more likely to happen with a single color than anything. For some people though, they get a whole visual.) If I simply see something like a picture, it is likely a memory-clip, that will be "best match" but alas, my mind uses concept, function, and other factors in its matching process, so it may or may not be a purely physical-match. If I see a visual that moves, or I see a clip of a person "acting out" something (an arm hands me something, a person strikes a pose, whatever), the first is "symbolic" and the second is "charadic" as I call it. If however I find myself "flying over" the target, and my vision is actually kind of fuzzy but is combined with a "gut feel and knowing," then I usually trust that data as being totally literal. This is critical to the understanding of how your mind works and what data you are actually getting.

The mind uses all these different kinds of presentations just like verbally we use "inflection" to modify and even reverse meaning. So in session, I may often write down how something comes across, or some piece of that as a reference. The onlooking public has no idea if this is itself data, or what this might mean. Like some points of method, it can be more confusing than helpful to readers.

Private Data

Then there's the issue of "private data." I wouldn't reveal highly personal data about an individual to the public, even if the individual was some dead public figure. I would want to record it, because the session record is first and foremost FOR ME. But that doesn't mean I want to share it with the world. Once I see feedback, I can decide whether or not that information is appropriate to be shared. If this were science, we would provide raw data, and we would not be worried about issues like ethics or privacy because science would be targeting us mostly on basic physical, nicely judgeable, statistics-deriving sort of targets that would make us all die of boredom. If it were applications, well, we assume there'd be a project manager (PM) in place to make sure target were cool, and so, I feel the client is paying for raw data as well as presentation data (which because it is a psi product, is itself additional information, even if it's only a slight revision in emphasis of the original data). But there is potentially private data of other sorts, such as spontaneous personal insights one may have during session, about their own life, or a friend.

All of those things are reasons why a "presentation session" is a useful thing. But there's much more.

When I get data, much of the time I get far too much, too fast, to properly record. I can have half-second "experiences" that would take 15 minutes to really flesh out, and many of them per a 20 minute session. Even the time it takes to note whatever strikes me as most obvious, and doesn't take longer than 5 seconds to write, may be a distraction of sorts---I have to shift into more of a left-brain state to do verbal data. Worse, if I'm still in good target contact, I'm probably an idiot about what I write down... I'm not left-brain enough, basically. If I don't make this shift and take all the time I need to record something, then I have not accurately or well provided the data. If I do, I have probably trashed some degree of the rest of my session, because instead of staying in close target contact and letting it flow-in while I can, I had to turn my attention to the outflow of communication.

It literally becomes a process where the session-recording and the data-incoming are competition for each other. No matter which one you focus on, you lose some of the other, and despite the on-paper perfect-world assumption that we record "as" we get data, that's an ad-hoc "try"---anybody experienced with this knows that there is a balance and a compromise here. Many people shy from method structures when they start feeling the structure is literally competing with the experience, and they are forced to give precedence to the experience instead, as the structure is designed to support that, not compete with that. In the early days or if not much data or not too fast, the structure can help lead you through it, but when you get plenty of data on your own and fast, it can be like a friction brake on the whole psychic process. But it isn't just structure, it's literally the act of having to write it all down.

When the future makes room for the present

Say I am sitting in session. I have a sudden flash of something, and then other data. I might not have time to write down all the details of my first flash. Further, because I'm in session, I may be really stupid about words, I often can't think of the words I want to use for things when in session. I really only have time to write down some kind of basic reference to the data.

If I stop to write down a lot more, I've pulled away from target contact, and trying to get to the correct words often sends me far toward a more linear state of mind better for writing and worse for viewing. If I stay and obsess on that data point to flesh it out, I will find myself trying to decide 'which part of it matters' in order to make the decision about what to write down, and in the end, I will probably end up in AOL-land, or really hacked because I wrote down 4 aspects of something, but it was 2 others I didn't mention that turned out to matter.

The most important thing is my target contact, continuing it and increasing it, so that it becomes as solid as possible by the end of the session.

When I tell myself that I am doing a presentation session afterward, I quit worrying about "which part of this ton of nested info I should be pulling out and writing down fast and moving on" because the decision is actually partly irrelevent: I will be going back through the session and then I can flesh out all of it if I want. Also, with the benefit of additional data and better target contact, what aspect of that 'flash' of nested info matters more than others, might be more clear. So I will have more data, more experience, more target contact, and yet probably a little better linear-state of mind than during the raw session, all of which can contribute to my "much fuller disclosure" of all the data available to me.

Because that's really what it comes down to. In the first raw session I don't have time to get down the "fullness and subtleties and context" of the data going by, and if I take the time I'm unlikely to maintain the kind of target contact that leads to an overall session being a good job. This especially goes for the "experiences" that are mini-movies, bilocations, aspect interaction, target interaction, etc. where one second can literally be an entire "experience", not just "a data point." It can literally be an entire page of narrative.

I have not done a ton of this, although I began this approach many years ago; I have seldom had time to view consistently and usually don't have time for the extra step in session. But of all the presentation sessions I have done, I have never once had it NOT be a great improvement on the original session when it comes to being understood by others. Even the process of taking it out of a structure, typing it up so it's readable (I scan sketches), getting rid of all the personal session comments that relate to process rather than data, can hugely improve the presentation of any session. But if you also have more detailed, better-stated information, that's a genuine quality improvement of the best kind.

I think of it like a book. When we get a book, it does not have the extended margin size, the printer crop marks, extensive editorial scribbling on it, etc. That may be the "raw product" but since the product is being presented to others, there is a second, "presentation product" that is geared toward people just picking it up and reading it and having some clue what it means.

Granted, we don't always have time, especially in practice, to put yet-more effort into each session. But on special occasions, I believe it's worth the effort. I have learned as much about myself, my data, how I think, etc. in the process of making the presentation sessions, as anything else. I'm inclined to think that even if they were not used, the simple process of compiling them is itself a healthy process for the viewer. Give it a try!

Data Ethics

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 03 July 2006

Darn I had fun on the HAARP Mission this week. (See it at TKR.)

When making my presentation session, there was some data I felt was less relevent. So I left it out. Later I realized that except a couple tiny silly AOL's, nearly everything I left out was negative stuff. Which if I had felt differently, I probably could have geared the presentation session to seeming quite different. It was not intentional, and I didn't know the target of course, but I'd be an idiot to pretend there is no psychology involved there.

So it's got me thinking about what is righteous and just. Now in my private viewing, it's nobody's business. If people want me to view for them (and seriously, I don't know why they would, I am no expert) they get what I give them. Learning to give them what is accurate is part of what I'm working on obviously. The raw session is mine. It's filled with process notes, spontaneous insights about people and situations nobody's business, and more. If they don't like taking what I give them, they don't need me viewing for them.

Of course, sometimes I just suck anyway, so they don't ask. I recall Tunde tasking me on something eons ago and I gave him a big session with a sketch focus on... well maybe it was a soccor ball, perfectly round with this hexa-something shape inside. I saw this guy with white all over his face, and had the mass-crowds-hysteria data already, and AOL'd bigtime on the 9/11 thing, esp. as I felt Tunde had a tendency to task terror targets at that time (tasker aol, sigh!), and made the session into some catastrophic event, when really it was a soccer (football) game (World Cup). This probably explains why he doesn't ask me for sessions anymore LOL. Anyway, where was I? I'm so ADD-like today it's ridiculous...

OK, but in public viewing -- such as with TKR -- what's fair and "just" for data? I gave the tasker a scan of my raw session. I uploaded the presentation session for everybody else (see TKR at the Dojo Psi, the Galleries, Missions page). And a bit later I went ahead and posted both over on PJRV for reference from my Red Cairo blog. So it's not private anymore. But it's got me thinking on this.

Should I be required to share raw data with "the public" if the forum in which I'm doing the viewing is "public"? Is that like an implicit part of the unspoken social agreement of viewers viewing together? Is it rude or overly secretive of me to keep my raw data private? (Not that this scan was much of an example. I couldn't find my lab book, was 3/4 asleep, and had to use some tiny journal-like book instead, in the near-dark. The only thing amazing about the session is that I could even read it to retype it the next day.)

I think I will be an autocrat and do what I want, how I want, when I want, anyway. But I posted a thread on the TKR RV webForum Board about this, just to see what other viewers think about it.

If you share all your data and it makes someone paranoid about something with zero evidence, is that a bad thing? I mean if it's bad to scare people for money as is done in RVland regularly by at least one source, is it just less-bad to scare them when it isn't for money? Is it less-bad to scare them about one topic rather than another? Where is the dividing line of what is "the right thing to do"?

I know... I'm neurotic. I'm a Virgo x4, gimme a break.

Targets as Sensei

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 29 June 2006

It's just too mushy to believe. And so . . . metaphysical! I apologize in advance for any hard-headed, no-nonsense viewers this post sends screaming into the night.

An interesting thing happened during Emotional Sequencing (pre-session intro) last night. And in the session that followed, I had an interesting experience that was difficult to articulate. No wonder. It is not normal to experience "being" a tornado, as a very unique creature. One can do little but personalize it in human terms! The session was imperfect (though had good data too) but that was my inability to translate, articulate, communicate. On feedback, I understood. My target contact rocked.

I suspect the pre-session insight and session as 'confirmation' may change a lot about my viewing. I feel that in my genuinely good-intentioned quest of self and universe to find some answers, I may have actually found something that has meaning to me.

I was intending to go through the common emotions for E.S. and it just... worked way better than expected. Along the way of feeling wonder-anticipation about the session, and determination, and humor, I had another new feeling appear inside me spontaneously, evolve into a whole new perspective, and it just ... carried me away!

The feeling up first was respect. This "bloomed" like an inner flower into a full acknowledgement of the target. Our own thoughtform definition as far as "inclusion and exclusion" goes, yet still its OWN thing of a sort. An identity of its own. Sort of. Not exactly self-aware, but aware.

Those feelings brought the understanding that a session explores a relationship between the viewer and the target. It then pulled in more of the respect, added a hefty dose of "fond appreciation," and a warmth spread from my chest as if my heart chakra were 'blooming', and suddenly I was perceiving the target as Sensei. Great respect for the honor of the relationship, for the opportunity to learn. The most astounding perception was this concept that it was agreeing to teach me. A mutual relationship.

Yet even as I marveled at this rather offbeat way of looking at it, a complete reversal of the normal me-as-centric, I realized that this is the most fundamental truth of a session: that I want to learn about it, of it, and from it. What makes me think that process would be all about me? And not equally about IT? The fact that "it" was something I'd been granting all the sentience of a postage stamp five minutes earlier did not escape me.

For years, I have had only two things I considered "givens" based on all my experiences over time. The rest is variable for me. These two things are not.

1. All things are composed of consciousness (which is energy which is inherently aware as a property which even when not self-aware is still awareness).

2. All things long for evolvement (via absorption of energy which is power which is like food which causes growth which is evolution).

These have been the core "understandings" I've held about reality for years. How could I have forgotten?

How could I have not applied this to Remote Viewing?

Here's a thought. What if when we miss a target, I mean really miss it---when we are literally "off target" (as opposed to misinterpreting or miscommunicating data from the target, which is different)---what if it's because the target at that moment does not choose to share itself with us? I'm reminded of the spoon-bending efforts, the feeling-for-permission activity, the shouting at it. We are trying to convince it? IT? Are we suggesting that a spoon has consciousness? If so, it'd seem a given that entire targets of information do. So what if it says "no"? Can we force it? Yes I believe we can, just like I can go dump chemicals on my plants/soil that will force bloom even if it is inappropriate timing for them. But maybe it takes extra effort and "Will" to succeed at the forcing when there is nothing "mutual" going on. Why make it harder than it needs to be? Isn't RV inconsistent enough without working against the universe?

Back in 1996-7 I had a dream where a target and I were having what felt rather like a dance. As I slowly awoke, a voice said to me, "It images itself for you." I put that on the front page of Firedocs RV because it struck me as so profound, and because at the time, it felt like the target and I had this relationship that I can only compare to lovers getting to know each other. As if I were a man and the target were a beautiful woman who deep down, really wanted to show herself, really wanted to be fully known, really wanted to be admired, really wanted to have the full uninhibited ability to interact with me without reservation and have me appreciate and delight in every part of her. Whether it's RV, dowsing or anything else, would it help to enlist the assistance of the others involved? That would be... the target, since that IS the other party involved, right? But we'd have to recognize the target as having some consciousness in order for this to happen. As long as we treat targets as if they're as unimportant and assumedly-dead as used chewing gum wrappers, we're unlikely to be granting them the kind of respect that would breed a good relationship and rapport.

Later when I thought about it, writing an email to a friend about this, I realized just how shallow the common perspective really is. The RV framework, in the process of getting rid of the religious and mystical garbage (and thank God for that, pun intended), seems to have gone to the other extreme. Maybe it is the element of having scientists and soldiers in a culture of consumers and corporatism, that set the "tone" for perspective and exploration, but it seems to me now, that our perspective is so... shallow and limited. Typical of the humans we are, with RV we act just like we do with anything else. Going in and taking what we want, with no regard to what is right for balance, no respect for our relationship with anything else--we cannot even recognize such relationships exist, because we don't grant sentience to anything else!

Information as a Natural Resource

We expect to know the target because we want to. We insist. Because it would be convenient and fun for us to have this power of insight. Because we want to harvest the information as a resource. Mostly, because we CAN. So... the same logic we used for everything from stealing land to polluting rivers we use with RV--- no matter how cosmic it might seem, no matter it's all about "consciousness," we don't seem to have any change of perspective for RV. We're human, we want it, so we take it, and we don't even think about the details. I am not saying we have been unkind to the universe via RV. I am just saying we are clueless and missing out as a result of the viewer-as- sole- participant- in-session perspective. The ignorance may affect our results. I suppose the reason this subject doesn't come up in the context of RV is because we do not for a moment expect that the target has anything to do with it. 'Cause it's all US, you know? Gosh, the universe revolves around humans, what else exists, let alone matters?

Amazing, really: you take the one niche group of people who ought to MOST respect the "consciousness of the universe" and they treat targets---whether people, animals, locations, events, or any combination of things---like "inanimate" objects. (Don't get me started on how inanimate objects are 'composed of consciousness' as well; they are not self-aware, that much is a given, but that doesn't mean they have no awareness that contributes to the mix of a given environment, or that contributes to the conglomerate of a target-identity. You can certainly share the awareness of an inanimate, I've done it. Spontaneously, never mind many times during RV.) We don't see a target as "a conglomerate of consciousness." As something we should respect, something we are interacting with, not just observing. One experienced viewer even told me that interacting with the target data was "incredibly dangerous" and should be avoided. Maybe so. But maybe being a genuine student of the universe means something more to me than RV on the surface does. The session that followed knocked my socks off. I am certain I could not have experienced that if I hadn't been willing to grant some degree of awareness to the target itself first.

So in the end, I had a question: what am I missing? How is my thinking limited or incorrect?

Love was the answer.

Maybe not the only answer, but one that I feel really opened my eyes... and heart.

Somehow, I think for a lot of people into viewing, this is just not going to be possible for them to get their brain around. I think it will sound too new age, too airy-fairy. I am usually the one saying viewers should not "project" their performance details onto taskers, analysts, and a variety of other things that we use as excuses in our field; that viewers should take total responsibility. But responsibility for my role, does not mean invalidating that anything else exists to mutually participate. Some people use the 'you create your own reality' concept to invalidate the universe around them as merely a projection; others use it to validate the universe around them as a delightfully creative canvas of self they get to interact with. I'm in the latter group, obviously. Most viewers have read that book "The Conscious Universe." Most viewers if questioned would be perfectly happy to say, that consciousness permeates our holographic universe, whatever. Yet I don't see or hear that armchair theory "rolling down into" perspective or theories or hands-on application or discussion.

What difference might it make in our physical world, if man began working with nature, with all things as deserving of respect, with the earth as a relationship?

What difference might it make in our psychic world, if we did the same thing?

---

"If you love it enough, anything will talk with you."
-- George Washington Carver

---

This Is Your Brain On RV

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 28 June 2006

It's on the tip of my brain. It's just half a geometry abstracted, like some session data just slightly too outside me. It is just... out... of... reach.

There is something incomplete in the way I think about RV. I can feel it. The funny thing is, I noticed this consciously some time ago, and since then half a dozen people privately have voluntarily brought up the subject. Their combined comments amount to:

I think there is something wrong with the way we think about RV, or psi, or reality, or something. Like if we had some different way of looking at it, somehow, things would be clearer. Like we are holding some assumption that is in our own way.

I figure this much spontaneous feedback from others means it's a thought I need to pay attention to.

---

First, there are things I know I should be applying to my session work. I've even mentioned these online eons ago in various pieces but forgot about them. There is just no excuse for me not to expand what viewing I do to incorporate these basics.

1. Target contact: After-session. I once had the 'intuitive insight'---a sort of information channeling---hit me right after a session that if I didn't have target contact, it's because that wasn't my true desire. And I thought it was, but the insight showed me that if it was, I would be getting in contact with it when I got feedback. I thought, "After feedback? But then it's too late!" But I "realized" (part of the insight) how ridiculous that is. There is no reason why you can't make target contact after seeing the feedback picture. If anything it ought to be a bit easier. The part that gets complicated is getting "novel" data without what you now-know-about-it interfering in some way, but so what? For the purpose of target contact only (not data), anybody psychic should be able to "tune into" a target in a picture. If we really, genuinely wanted that target contact, we would want it---and we would make that effort not only during the session but afterward. And of course, this would intensify the feedback experience quite a bit. When I practiced this, and I was doing my session late at night, I would often dream about the target... in some of the coolest ways! Often really 'shamanic'-like experiences... and where the target itself had consciousness.


2. Target sketching: After-session. Following on the intuitive insight above, I had the perfectly normal insight following one session that if I cannot sketch something while looking at the feedback photo, how do I expect to sketch it while remote viewing it? Often my perspective during the session is bizarre. As if my eyeballs were resting on the dirt 20 feet from the target and turned at a 45 degree angle or something. I am terrible at "perspective" in sketching which really makes my viewing process suffer, given nearly everything I see visually is in some bizarre partial-and-perspective state. Well it occurred to me that if I wanted to work on sketching, when I get feedback, I should sketch the target (FB). But then I realized that was an even better idea than I realized, because if you only quick line-draw sketched "what was most important and relevent about the target" during this practice, you would literally be "educating" that part of yourself about what should be considered 'most important and relevent'. So, leave out the flagpoles and fire hydrants and curbs and surroundings and people standing around; if what is important is a pointy structure, a porch structure, a lawn filled with political picket signs, and people in line on the porch, then that is the only thing that should be in the sketch. This would help with the target contact attempt above, it would help with educating ourselves about the 'most important and relevent' focii, and it would help sketching skills to get some practice.


3. Love the one you're with. I truly believe that rapport is greatly facilitated by "appreciation" of anybody and anything, and that having a respect for the target, no matter what its possible nature, just as an equally valid "experience", is something to be consciously considered.


4. Emotional Sequencing. This is a term I came up with many years ago to describe deliberately working through emotions like a karate kata. You map out emotions that are conducive. Hope. Wonder. Suspense. Humor. Delight. Earnestness. Determination. Acceptance. etc. and you go through them, in order, giving yourself several seconds of each to really 'get it into yourself', it's an emotional cocktail, a recipe, to help generate the kind of "power" on the feelings-side to help drive intent.

These things are part and parcel of doing remote viewing practice "fully". Not just of sitting down, writing impressions and moving on, but of really squeezing every drop of experience and improvement out of every session. Why is that some people can practice three times a week and advance better than some practicing three times a day? Because some people get so much more out of the practice they put in. Maybe they learn better 'visually' from feedback than others---in which case, the emotions and the sketching of after-feedback rapport+sketch should help others a lot. Maybe they are more talented, who knows. But I feel a session should not just be considered the moments writing things down, but should include the warm-up process and the session "review" process (for practice) as well, and without those other components, it's not complete.

I don't know what the answer is to "the perspective" that I feel I do not have... correctly-set for Remote Viewing to somehow be a little different for me. I feel as if it's all a geometry, and I am not really in alignment.

Will blog more rambling on firedocs.

Multi-lingual Mind: Interpreting Symbols

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 28 June 2006

I don't think my subconscious is speaking the same language I am.

I don't like the word 'subconscious' as it comes with lots of baggage-assumptions and mental-models I don't share, but lacking a better word for consensus reality, I'll use that one.

I had the idea last night that if a target is... a thing of its own, its own energy, and I am a thing of my own, my own energy, then our experience of the target is actually a distinctive and unique third-thing, which is "Me+Target=Session". I know that's obvious. But when you really think about that, it implies a whole lot of question about that third-thing and its nature.

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OPTION 1

If I get symbology instead of basic target data, could it be in part because there is some... inability in myself to clearly perceive the target for what it is? Maybe it's something obscure like body-clarity, literally; some tiny nerve cluster is blocked by toxins or pressure, is it possible that means data can't route that way or be pulled from storage near that place, so the body has to look elsewhere?

Well that is only one idea. There are others.

Is there some obscure value or energy in me that would make my interior-energetic-perception of any given object or location or person, different than how I would perceive it with my eyes?

You know how you can be in OBE state and you might see a chair with a jacket on the back, but it's pulled out rather than under the desk like it 'literally' is at that moment. There might be your cat sleeping on the end of the bed who it so happens died 5 years prior; and the tree outside might be conscious; and there may be a large river, sky and trees around included, rushing through the area that 5 minutes ago when you were IN your body, was the hallway outside your bedroom door. It's just another day in OBEland.

I used an allegory in Bewilderness that I called "The Rainbow of Soul" and said to consider physical reality the red band, the astral reality the orange band, and mental reality the yellow band. What happens when you are somewhere "between" red and orange? Close enough to red that we can perceive physical reality... far enough into orange that it's... pretty.... weird...?

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OPTION 2

Might there be something up with remote viewing that is giving us "a small dose" of this same issue OBE perception has, except so small a dose, that instead of recognizing it, we just toss the result off as "symbolism" or "inaccuracy"?

Aside from more-alert (vs. deeply altered state) forms of RV, might there be any other way to help "ground" the perceptions we get, in the "frequency" where our physical reality is currently operating?

Lately, I've had this idea that maybe I've been thinking about it all backward.

Usually, I think about it like, if I don't get a sufficient amount of specific info, my target contact wasn't good enough. In short, I figure I wasn't getting enough information.

But maybe it's just the opposite. Maybe the pathways inside me have so much MORE data from the target (than my eyes), that the "symbolic-word(s)" it uses to communicate something to me is forced to "include" more density of info.

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OPTION 3

Could it be that the information I get is changed because I'm actually getting a better more "complete" view? And that it's a reverse-engineering problem, where rather than trying to get more information, I am actually in need of getting vastly less, or figuring out how to "strip it down" to less, or "separate the components" so I can get only the specific dimension of data (physical data usually) that I want?

I am NOT really referring here to something like a methodology which, like CRV, deliberately forces the viewer to 'start with component data', because this issue occurs even within methodology when at later stages. I'm more concerned with how our minds may "roll up" and present some furled-symbol that 'incorporates' a lot of information, and how to become aware of that, how to decipher it, etc.

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I want to do some examples¹ from sessions over the next few months, because I don't feel there is nearly enough hands-on session-experience discussion or examples online. Working on that in the background. For the foreground and now, I'm going to use my regular practice sessions and just pull out one little example of how something worked, as often as I have time. This may be data that is accurate, inaccurate, symbolic, or whatever needed for the example.

^{(In examples, I may slightly change minor things to provide 'sense or context' for my point, to aid in clarity or brevity.)}

I hope readers understand that anybody with a website or microphone can claim omniscience. Anybody could show you only pieces of sessions or only certain sessions or even "improved" (ha...ha) sessions, that would make readers drool in awe over their magnificent psychic ability. I want to example stuff I find interesting, or worth considering, or wondering about. As luck would have it alas, this is unlikely to be data that actually matches the target perfectly, since there wouldn't be much to wonder about in that case. Nothing I example should be construed as summing up my viewing, heh!

Today's example is about symbology.

Session evaluation for learning purposes is a matter of looking at feedback and re-vivifying how it 'felt' when you got data, and attempting to find the connection between what you felt, and what is in the target. Sometimes this is guessing + feeling = assumption, but that's the tools we have and the puzzle we have to solve.

I'm hoping it doesn't make anybody think I'm trying to 'stretch' data to fit or something like that. Only the viewer knows what they feel in session, what they feel with feedback, and how things might relate. Sometimes real obvious relations (and even seemingly accurate data), the viewer knows is wrong (e.g., they were applying it to something very different than it seems). Sometimes stuff others see no relationship in, the viewer understands the internal connection that brought a certain kind of data for a certain target element. This is a good faith effort here.

Although I experiment constantly, I have a 'base' I go back to. I've just gone back to my roots and for this example (from last night) I was using my typical personal method. It employs Warcollier's ideograms, though differently than CRV, and something I invented years ago that I call Aspect RV based on Jane Roberts' "Aspect Psychology" work. I call my method "PJRV"---what else? It is part of Zen do Ryu Remote Viewing as the Dojo Psi would put it.

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In last night's session, I had about 40 minutes. Tasking was system-generated (we mix TKR, RV Targets, and some other sites) by my viewing buddy who provided feedback after we both finished our sessions. Fairly early in the session, about 10 minutes in, I'd had some ideograms, text, a sketch "fragment" and then I asked an Aspect for information.

In the end, the session overall made me believe that I had decent target contact, or I would not use this as an example. I am focusing here on only one tiny piece of data. Obviously there's other and better-related data that makes me feel I had some connect.

I saw a person walking across this ~12 foot long, flat structure floating on water, like a pier but on the water. He had come from something and was going to something, both at the same level but solid, rather like the edge of a dock but down at the same level as what he was walking on. I "felt" he was walking on something that got him from one place to the other and kept him out of the water. My "sense-interpretation" was that the important part was the middle-thing; not the water, not even the walking although that would be included, but the focus was the object and its function.

There were a few primary data points in the target. I would consider them this:

1 - church structure

2 - porch structure

3 - people

4 - front lawn with signs

5 - concept of politics and voting

6 - concept of competition, advertising, signs

Wrong or right, this is my example: I believe that the data I got of the fellow walking across a flat structure from one place to another was symbolic or best-internal-match data for the ramp/porch in this target.

Had I articulated the minimal basic data well, which I didn't (I ignored the AOL, I said path instead of structure, I failed to note the wood-dock-like look, etc.), it would have been ok. The min basic was this: "There is a small connecting structure a person can walk across to get from one area to another." Of course, I didn't really know what or which data was appropriate at the time.

OK here's the part that drives my viewer-brain Stark. Bleeping. Crazy.!: I've seen lots of wood porches in my life. There is no obvious reason why my mind could not simply have dived into my database of memory and grabbed me any number of useful "wood porches" -- even those with people standing on them, even those that ramp up, I have seen them all! So you gotta ask:

Why didn't it just show me a freakin' wooden porch?!

Well, I'm guessing of course, but maybe to my subconscious, the visible-physical part is just very shallow. Too few dimensions of data.

Maybe it showed me what it did in part to get the concept related to the church across. Instantly my mind got the 'walk on water/religious' idea.

I didn't realize it until feedback, but the "dock-like flat structures" that were offside "each end" of the thing the fellow in the visual was walking, were wooden-beam structures just like the porch.

So we have:
* composites (wood) accurate,
* gestalt (structure) accurate,
* function and purpose (leading one safely from one side to another) is accurate
.......although only in part as the water thrown into the symbol is distractive.
* But the water/change in the symbol brought the concept (religious) in, which added more data
.......even though in doing so, it "distracted" me by seeming to give me extra/inaccurate physical data.

In a conversation we may choose several different words which have meanings that overlap, but slightly-different associations (or 'semantic baggage') with them. Perhaps the subconscious is doing this, but in its own way. Maybe whatever we see is actually like a "carrier wave" with yet-more data to "unfurl" from whatever we got.

(Hmmn. I just thought of that just now. I'm interested in 'interacting with the data', a hangup from my archetype work... I wonder if a visualization to record what I get and then 'unfurl it' to see what else comes through would bring anything of note. Will have to try it and let you know.)

In order to make sense of this and be better at viewing, I need to better understand the symbolism I get.

And in order to do this, understanding how-and/or-why my mind creates the symbolism it does to begin with, would help!

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But then again.

Maybe it's not all about us. We are only one variable in a two-variable equation. Maybe sometimes it's about the target, too.

Might it be possible that a target inherently has its own history that is part of its identity and hence how it comes across to us as well?

Might the founding/creation intent, the usage, and other factors become "intrinsic or implicit" parts of the target itself, and hence show up in data? We assume yes... right? (I say this not as a caveat to excuse data, but as a consideration to better understand data.)

So if certain... qualities, creation, experience, concepts, purposes, functions, are intrinsic to the target, well, that means we don't know the target as well as we think we do. Like a lovely young woman we think we know all about based on what she looks like, maybe the target, like a person, can have surprising depths and twists that we don't know about, but which underlie the very essence of what it IS. In that case, our variable changed. The target isn't what we think, in that case. It may LOOK like a porch, or a cheerleader, but maybe there is more under the surface than we could feasibly guess at, but that psychically will come across just fine. The Target + Viewer = Data equation will have a different result.

Most of this is intuitively obvious from any armchair.

None of it's new but for new folks I'm walking through it, and because I've been thinking about it lately.

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How does this translate into practical terms for remote viewing?

It's not enough to Stage 5 your session into the ground. Those are useful tools, although to me they are more like "no-brainer processes you'd use during viewing" (not as a stage). A whole effort of S5 applied to a session would only result in yet more data on top to try and figure it out (in a structure that already has on average way too much data for clarity about what is accurate or meaningful in my opinion). So I don't think that's an answer.

In a perfect world, we would have sufficient target contact to just "know" what matters. In the real world, sometimes we do... often we don't.

As part of figuring this out, I feel one needs every session to be a four-part process, to get as much learning from the experience as possible.

1. The first part being what I call Emotional Sequencing, a formal and more complex version of what most people call the cool-down or warm-up. (I used to be very 'into' hypnosis and NLP and this is a riff taken from some techniques in there.) Or in a nutshell, psyching yourself up for the session.


2. The second being the session itself. Whatever it might be.


3. The third being "a session on the session." We might drop some data, and we might add other data, and we might further-flesh-out sketches or annotations of sketches. This is what is done in a CRV summary except here we're applying that not to a paragraph of words at the end of the session, but rather to what I call a "presentation session" that is a second, similar but separate product. The original session, to me, is personal; it may have personal notes and experiences and thoughts and private data. The "presentation session" has the data I wish to present to others. (If I am wrong about what to include vs. not, or what gets added, well, that's part of what I'm learning.)


4. The fourth being a sketch and a rapport process with the target once there is feedback, accompanied by then going through the session vs. target-FB in detail for understanding.

Repeating experience, improved target contact, familiarity with symbols, and just plain asking for "literal visual" data, all of these obviously go toward better understanding this process.

But I still feel that for me, there is a whole yawning abyss (how's that for symbolism) when it comes to symbolic data and understanding it. I get data in a session and I know it applies... just not how!

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If I see a flash of a structure, vertical wood beams, wall and overhanging roof, with a man standing there, what part is the data? Is it 'structure'? 'Wood'? 'Overhang'? 'Roof'? 'Vertical beams'? The man? Something about the man? Is it that he's standing around? Is it "all of the above" (man standing around on porch of a shack made of wood beams with a porch roof overhang)? The smallest flash of visual contains so much data. Figuring out which data is what my mind is trying to get through is the hard part.

Some might reasonably say that I shouldn't be focusing on "what matters" in session because that's trying to do analysis on the data as it comes in; one should just record what one gets. But I must in this respect, not because I want to match feedback even, but because I want to understand myself. There's more reason than that, though:

At times I would need to spend ten minutes writing an entire essay on all the data contained within a micro-second flash. After which, I would be totally in left-brain mode and out of the session flow. I'd have pages of data and only one or two points in there would matter at all, and even that only in symbol. The only miracle would be having sessions shorter than 6 hours, and avoiding the AOL drive that three solid pages of data all about a single given symbol is likely to provide.

Some people ask for literal data and they get it. Their mind just hops in and says "Stone," or whatever. I spend time learning how a combination of four unique, nebulous body-feelings combine in order to feel that something is stone; some people just ask for it and get it. Go figure. Sometimes that works for me. Sometimes not.

Until I find a way to make getting literal data consistent, I guess I need to figure out "how to figure out" the symbolic stuff, though.

White Flags and the Remote Viewing Blues

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 24 May 2006

We might all be psychic, but like most viewers I experience this in spots. If yesterday and today I am omniscient, tomorrow I might not be able to accurately describe a garbage can. This is the only reason my ego isn't larger than Jupiter and I can still stand myself. On most days.

But the last month of viewing has been such a trial of character, my ego is now the microscopic size of a Saint's. When I finally broke through and did something right, I was so happy to get any accurate data I felt like falling to my knees in a religious level of gratitude. "I was blind, but now I see!" Literally.

I'm pulling out of that swamp of the psyche now. Most viewers only talk about success, but today I'd like to talk about a phase of being totally, utterly, consistently lousy at RV.

Just how bad is it?

When I say viewing was horrid the last month I don't mean ordinary inconsistency.

I don't mean the cycle of "change" inside that seems to revise the whole symbolic and ideogram vocabularly and make you feel like now that you've finally got a handle on the conversation, the subconscious is starting it all over again. And you know how much fun it is when you start: as I said after CRV methods training eons ago, From all appearances, the subconscious speaks Etruscan in 4-D, translates it through geometry, encrypts it in some long-dead fish language, and then feeds you that information in code. Of course, it's always perfectly obvious in retrospect.

I don't even mean a cycle of feeling "blocked," where one sits about staring moodily at the paper, until either the mind makes something up out of sheer desperation, or falls asleep in despair-based denial.

I mean just a consistent dose of plain ol' "can't hit the broad side of a barn." This is the flag, that dratted C-word: "consistent." Remote Viewing has only one thing sure: it's inconsistent. Nobody is good or bad forever. That's what gives novices hope, despite the long haul of learning, and keeps others from being unbearable.

I am not always on target by any means, but more often than not, I am---which is not to brag in any way because you can be on target and still have a miserable session. It's just that if my sessions are lousy, it's usually a process fault: my translation, articulation, interference, etc. had problems. Most the time, it's not because I didn't have target contact.

Chance (probability) alone suggests that even by sheer accident, we'll have at least basic data correct once in awhile. So when session failure is "consistent," there is something going on. That's not just being lousy at RV, it's actual psi-missing. This suggests a big problem in viewer psychology.

It's ok to suffer. But being an undisciplined whiny half-wit isn't ok, so the next thing to do when your RV sucks is to think about how to dig your way out.

Signs You've Got Remote Viewer's Angst

Dentist appointments are a welcome break from your suffering.

Newbies make you want to shout "Run, Hans! Escape while you can!"

Lunatics on the radio make you sympathetic: "End of the world, eh? We've all had those days, buddy."

Even the drooling TKR galleries commenters couldn't make your session seem like a hit.

You start to wonder if you skipped a step that'd make this work. Like maybe selling your soul.

You start secretly wishing for an AOL-drive disaster; at least it'd feel like a good session.

(Paranoid guilt arrives. Yes. You will be punished for even thinking about AOL drive like that.)

You investigate your 'gut feeling' about RV and it only says "Go away. But first give me more chocolate."

You suspect your cat is thinking, "I knew you were a psychic brick. This is news?"

Re-gearing and Re-tooling

I have a few pick-me-up approaches I have used over time to recoup from blinding incompetence. I recently, finally employed a couple, and already things are better. So as my contribution to viewer-therapy, I offer:

HOW TO KICK THOSE I-SUCK-AT-RV BLUES.

1. No more than one session a day.
   
   Desperation breeds repetition. When what we're doing isn't working, we tend to do the same thing harder, rather than do something differently. I am all for lots of practice but once ya slide into a miss-mode it's different. "More sessions" in this mode end up resulting in less focus, with less emphasis on the individual session. It distributes the agony of failure. It gives the subconscious a soft landing---"I can always try again." Demand your subconscious perform during the only chance it's got. Pull in your focus, regroup, parse your viewing down to a few specific occasions, and give it all you've got. Viewing while in a funk usually just means more lousy feedback experiences to break your heart. Do just one session a day. Plan for it. Psyche yourself up for it. Feel for it. And then do it well. If it doesn't go well, don't go on doing session after session. Just do that one. If you fail, then suffer! On purpose. It builds character---and determination.


2. Modify session work to "exercises" with specific expectations.
   
   It's important to get feedback validating your ability and accuracy. The longer-larger the session, the more room for wandering. When sessions go badly for awhile we often tend to drag out the process, our self-confidence having been weakened, our sense of target contact being nebulous. Set yourself an exercise(s) that is brief---not more than 15 minutes at the most---and that is very specific. Decide, for example, that you want to have at least one decent visual in the session which, upon feedback, you will be able to clearly correlate to the target. That is your only goal for that exercise. It doesn't matter if all the data is wrong. If during the session you had one decent visual that, on feedback, you can see was on-target, then you know you ARE being psychic and getting the data you wanted and it's just a matter of focus. If that doesn't work, change your goal: make it to get just the gestalt, or just one good color---whatever. Find a goal you can meet. (If you're doing "little exercises" rather than whole sessions, several a day is fine.)


3. Knock off the "field politics," if you've got any or read any.
   
   Nothing has done my viewing more damage than the contentious debate on the internet and the ridiculous hype-schtick of the media. I get to where I sit down to view and my overall emotional, psychological association with the whole topic of 'remote viewing' is affected by the fact that I am disgusted and bored and annoyed about a variety of RV topics or people. Even just reading email lists or message boards or chat rooms where people spend more time grousing about the details or opining from the armchair than actual viewing, can drag one's attitude down. For some reason it's harder to clear my mind during RV of RV-related topics than even of far more serious personal topics. Anything "distracting" you may be engaged in that relates to remote viewing, take a break from it for awhile. "Congregating" in general is good, sharing with others is a basic need and supportive of the community, but let it happen in cycles that work for you, not all the time. When you're having a dry run of session results, make sure your viewing is just about viewing, and not even potentially about anything or anybody else.


4. Re-acquaint yourself with basic RV details.
   
   Re-read a book like McMoneagle's Remote Viewing Secrets. We breeze through it, "yada yada, we know all that," and move on, but a re-read by any serious viewer will usually find several things they'd forgotten about, some things they hadn't noticed in the last read, some things they now have more experience with than they did when they read it the first time, etc. On the chance your current RV issues are protocol-related, this may remind you. But even if not, it's good to stay involved with RV in positive ways and "viewing downtime" is the perfect opportunity to refresh your memory on details and maybe come up with a few new ideas for exercises.


5. Refuse to lose --- never surrender!
   
   I suspect sometimes that much of RV success over the long term is a matter of simply being such an unreasonable, stubborn bonehead that you refuse to lose. At least, for the really good viewers I know, this seems to be a trait they have in common! Plod on. Re-affirm to yourself that your success and development is going to happen, it is totally inevitable, you are going to be good at this no matter what, that if it isn't working right now the subconscious is really just wasting both your time because it's going to work, so the subconscious might as well get with the program. Refuse to accept anything else.


6. Make space and time to talk with your psychology.
   
   Sometimes there is inner-stuff going on that we need to deal with... and we aren't doing so. These things may interfere with sessions. Or in some cases, they may actually influence the data or experience in weird ways. Do some pro-active meditation on any issues in your life---including your dry-run of recent RV success, that's an issue---and see if you can work through it a little to "free up" your insides. Be creative. If you don't meditate, take a shower and do the dishes or wash the car and use those as visualizations of cleaning up and rinsing off "resistance" and things like that. Remote Viewing is as much about you as the target. (In some philosophies these aren't really separable.) Sometimes the issue isn't RV itself; sometimes that is only a side-effect of other things. See if you can resolve the "you" part of the equation through normal psychological means.

Go View. You can't give up or you really might be doomed. Most "breaks" from RV end up being rather like taking a break from a diet -- likely to become much longer than planned! -- and it doesn't get easier. I'm here to tell ya from experience---from way, way too much experience---that stopping and re-starting again brings a development curve Every. Single. Time. The loss of "momentum" in belief systems and practice are both very pronounced. I'm just your average uptight left-brain sort and if I can do it, you can do it!

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.

Yahoo Skeptic's Dictionary Remote Viewing Rant

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 17 May 2006

It has always struck me as odd that, as critical as search engines are about tags, quantity of content on a given topic etc., that often, a simple one page article on the Skeptic's Dictionary --- usually replete with more inaccuracy than a jr. high paper and more bias than a political activist --- makes it so high in the search engines on so many topics. This same "search logic" isn't so apparent in anything else as it is for that website.

In general, if you have one page on a topic, and maybe a dozen other pages that might mention a phrase, that would never --- no, never, not in the wildest spam-marketing "we'll make your website #1!" dreams --- place a site near, let alone above, a website utterly dedicated to the topic with hundreds (or more) pages ALL of which mention the subject at hand.

But it works for the Skeptic's Dictionary. This is apparently, in part, because as a single-entity website, they are the mental stormtroopers of the internet's Thou Shalt Not (...dare think for yourself). Their traffic is astounding -- in great part because search engines rank them well, which I don't think is a factor in rank, as that'd be a circular argument. They have thousands of links-in to their website. Of course, that works well when your website actually covers a ton of different subjects, so has a much larger "link-in base" than the average site dedicated to a topic, not to mention when the whole of academia in the Western world worships your website. Search engines represent specific content searched for, but they apparently weight by even parts of the website which have no reference to that. That's why an article from some newspaper can come up on a subject in your search results, even though on the whole of it, that paper may have very seldom had a word to say about that unique topic: the newspaper site at large has such a traffic flow and links-in that this alone amplifies the rank any of the content is given.

On its own, I have no gripe with it, aside from the fact that the author of several of the articles I've read there is a moron. I don't care how many years his butt sat in a chair in college --- my gosh, that's a real testament to why some people oughtta be made to work for a living at a younger age --- he's an idiot. The inability to intelligently discriminate factual information is a telling sign of these creatures no matter what subject they're covering, and no matter what credential is hanging from their neck, as even the RV field itself ought to make clear. I quit caring what people this stupid thought a long time ago, but I admit it is a little exasperating when the primary driver of the internet weights "remote viewing" results not simply by what has remote viewing data, or the most of it, but instead by what has a zillion pages and links on other topics having nothing to do with it at all. So if you have a zillion pages about basket weaving, and one about RV, and a bunch that have the RV term somewhere, as long as lots of basket-weavers link to your site, you can win the RV search engine term award?

Fortunately for the Skeptic's Dictionary, Yahoo is as good to them as Art Bell is to Ed Dames. To about the same end result.

Firedocs Remote Viewing has held the #1 spot on Yahoo search engine for the "Remote Viewing" term search for a long time. About a month ago I did make some changes -- put up additional information, all of which had more info about remote viewing (and yes, with that term everywhere). It is possible that adding more info about remote viewing to my already huge remote viewing website, would cause it to actually fall lower in the 'remote viewing' search ranks. In the search engine world, this kind of logic would not really surprise me. But Firedocs falling to the #2 spot is not actually what is bothering me. I know that any time I so much as add a sentence to my site, god only knows what the results will be; search engine logic makes the Cabalah look simple.

What REALLY hacks me off is that they gave the #1 search engine rank for the term "remote viewing" to the Skeptic's Dictionary!

The link is a brief one page article on remote viewing, and thanks to Yahoo it now serves a good chunk of the world as the "primary" information "about" remote viewing.

ONE page. One BRIEF page. Never mind the content dissing RV---I don't expect search engines to judge that. The point is, there is no righteous reason to weight that publication so heavily that it gets ranked ahead of every single other website on the internet ABOUT remote viewing. Which that website is NOT.

There are sites -- not just mine, but others too -- that have THOUSANDS of files, in half a dozen media formats, all utterly dedicated to remote viewing.

But the Skeptic's Dictionary places #1.

Don't think this is by accident. They've now managed to get Yahoo's #1 ranking for the massive keyword "psychic" and #2 for "crop circles," as well.

There are some search engines that are "Human Arbitrary" ranked, sure. Ask Jeeves is a good example. But Yahoo is allegedly not.

Thought

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 10 May 2006

Maybe we are all part of one very, very, very, very large entity who is very, very, very, very schizophrenic.

Active Boredom and In-Session Repression

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 07 May 2006

Repeat after me: There is no such thing as "intense, active boredom." Boredom is the antithesis of intense or active anything. I have to remind myself of this regularly. It's taken me a long time to work out my understanding and get a handle on it. This is an emotional combination I get sometimes before, and often during, a session. The sense of boredom is a side-effect---an artificially caused interpretation actually stemming from internal repression.

It is, basically, an inner part of myself attempting to close down the process, and having no tools to work with except my emotions. If I respond to this sudden 'intense, active boredom' with an end to the session, the subconscious avoidance tactic has worked. It will then try it more, as a trusted tool for accomplishing that end. If I let this happen, I can find myself with what seems an inexplicable, chronic case of Attention Deficit Disorder---before and during session.

Aside from the 'intense boredom' effect, I may also get 'anxiety' effects. This is nothing major; it's a low-level "inner turbulence" is all. But it's substantial enough that, even if I am not paying my attention to it, it may either send me away from viewing and into other ways to spend my time, or it may have an impact on the session itself, as I may be more easily frustrated, impatient, or simply unable to really 'open up' as much as the process requires.

I have never met a serious viewer who, when the subject of issues like this came up, didn't know the subject far too well from their own cycles of experience. The better the viewer, the moreso.

I have met people on the internet who swear 'fear of psi' is not the slightest issue for them though, and assure me they are perfectly ok with knowing the whole universe right now. I tend to think these people don't know themselves very well. In my experience----and observation of others----it only takes a small dose of "the universe" for just about any human to face a profound revision in some core psychological constructs. Which, as anybody who's done it knows, tends to be a little bit exhilarating, a little bit terrifying, and a whole lot internally-exhausting. It requires a constant re-creation of mental frameworks to replace those that get obliterated regularly, and even "in cycles" this is damned hard work, never mind constantly.

Building Your Own Tools

Self-hypnosis is a terrific format for therapy. I got more therapy in a few years, thanks to this model, than a lifetime of well paid formal analysis could have done for me. Followed by a few years of archetype work (such as Steinbrecher's fabulous model), I probably evolved more in a 10 year period than some folks do in a whole life. Of course, I was pretty far down when I began; there was a lot of room for improvement! (....There still is.)

One thing I appreciate about this approach is that it is a proactive way of playing with your mind, using the environment and language it understands. The mind has a language that we interpret symbolically. We can have personal relationships with these symbols----that is dreaming, but dreaming in that sense can be conscious and planned, too.

Some people will intuitively personalize everything. If they encounter the effects above, they may write it into an entire dramatic script of "why" that involves anything from how they feel about a session from two years ago, to whether some secret black intelligence group is involved. This actually allows a good format for working with it. If feeling that "the aliens are suppressing your psi" (for example) makes you want to tell the aliens to stuff it because they can't control me! etc., then why not use that personalization as a tool of its own? I'm management at heart, I care less for the detail than the overall result of getting something accomplished. It may or may not be the aliens or black ops leaning against your becoming omniscient, but I don't care----whatever "personalization framework" will allow you to consciously work with the "avoidance or repression effects" as a specific symbol, something you can have a relationship with, then I feel on the whole that's a useful thing.

You can consciously make a given emotion or effect into a dream-symbol, anything you want, and work with it in meditation. Heal it, talk to it, let your mind be the go-between you need for talking to your subconscious.

You Must Go Through, You Can't Go Around

On a practical level, aside from the psychology, one way to deal with the ADD/boredom/denial effects when they cycle around (for me, most things come in cycles), is to come up with some methodology (if you haven't already got one) that is going to keep your butt in sessionn long enough to accomplish something no matter how you feel. Force discipline on yourself in other areas: a required detail feedback/session review; a required 'presentation session' to cumulate and summarize all the data that (there at the end) you think is most relevent.

Don't let the psyche's typical, constant and cyclical reaction to the destruction you're doing to its foundations, hold you back. Make it a symbol and go talk to it, heal it, ask to have dreams with it, make it clear what you want to do and WILL DO, and then do what you can to help that part of you adapt and deal with it. Your inner self is definitely your friend in RV; validate it even when it is troubled. You have a responsibility to provide accomodation-for-adaptation for your psychology, just like it feels a responsibility to protect you, a responsibility you trample on when you go tune into 'the universe' outside what the ego feels it has a handle on.

Of course, then the ego tries to feel it has a handle on the universe and you become another arrogant viewer bonehead with an ego the size of, well, a universe. But if you're attentive, and don't let that seduce you, that will pass!

Go view! We have to keep viewing. It seems at least a session a day is needed just for keeping the door from starting to shut. No matter what kind of approach you use for your viewing, the one consistent factor that clearly shows in viewer skill is the quantity of "thoughtful, in-protocol practice" they have put into the subject. Do anything you can to make it more often, more fun, more creative, more diverse, anything. But ya gotta view!

Personalization and Fear of Psi

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 07 May 2006

I've been thinking about something for awhile, waiting for "how to articulate it" to settle down. It almost seemed to require stages of development, and I posted the first in a couple days ago. It's something I've been wanting to talk about, but a post by Don over at TKR a week or so ago got me more solidly on this track. I didn't post on that thread because I wanted to think it through and post here instead. It's a whole subject of importance to me, but it has many facets, which makes it tough to blog without a novel.

There are three parts to the concept-equation meandering through my head:

1. Personalization as a mental-technology tool of humans;


2. Psychological response and constant re-adjustment to viewing; and


3. Using A to deal with B.

(I should note that previous to my last decade spent obsessing about Remote Viewing, for a decade prior I was instead obsessing about Hypnosis (and a few other minor things, like graphoanalysis, NLP, etc.). So I have some degree of "intentional design of mental models" as a background.)

Personalization.

As a follow-on to The Personal Universe: I think humans interact most effectively with anything else via the framework of identity and "a personal relationship." I think when this is strong, humans do very well with any subject in question, and the more it dissolves into broad generics----where it's nothing personal, where it's not so much 'a relationship' as 'a philosophy'----the less internal leverage humans seem to have. Whether in shamanic training, archetypal psychology, visualizations to fight cancer etc., the application doesn't matter. From formal research to layman's arts, humans have found repeatedly that deliberately personalizing a "relationship" with a given concept, energy, situation, etc. is one of the most effective ways for us to interact with, and change, things... both inside us and outside us (since, as zen philosopher Alan Watts noted, there isn't really a difference).

Until we are able to establish a relationship----the basic upon which human experience seems to rest----we are merely observers. We can watch the tragic scenery of our lives go by, and hope that merely changing the after-effect of our "reactions" will somehow make things better. Once we have a relationship with a given energy, situation, identity, etc., we are capable of interacting with it, and of causing primary-change that modifies reality from the internal blueprint itself. Jesus was quoted as having said that A house divided cannot stand, and any time I feel the sense that I am "working against myself, somehow," when my conscious and subconscious feelings don't seem to be merged, I know that I am divided against myself and it's time to seek resolution.

Crowley once called 'magick' the Art of causing change in accordance with one's Will, a definition that works for me whether I'm talking about my efforts at self-psychology or anything else. Remote Viewing is part of my studies about how to better understand, be 'aware' of, and hence make what I wish of, myself and my reality at large. Whether we interact with and create our internal and external realities isn't really an option; awareness is the only "optional" part of it.

As Crowley put it, Why should you study and practice Magick? Because you can't help doing it, and you had better do it well than badly.

Fear of Psi.

I've had several archetype meditations on the Fear of Psi. When I planned them, it was with the idea that I had no such issue at all, and that this would probably make that clear. It was more a 'basic, obligatory' thing-on-my-list-to-cover. As it turns out, they have been some of the most deep, terrifying, difficult meditations I've ever done. Someday I'm going to remember where I recorded them and put them online for others to see, just for the novelty of it.

Some people suggest that this is a base: everybody has it, every culture. I think that is a given: from the womb, and surely from birth, we are being constantly trained to "exclude information which does not conform to the consensus reality" of our parents/those around us. It's an every-minute learning. By the time we reach adulthood and consider remote viewing as a practice, there is so much repetitive self-indoctrination of what we "cannot" know and "must ignore" it's sort of amazing we do as well as we do, I think. I used to say we filter out everything that doesn't fall within the biological frequency bandwidth so hence, ghosts are invisible and psi-based data unknown. But that is untrue. Those things are within the biological bandwidth to perceive, or people wouldn't perceive them! So, it's not that we can't, it's simply that we won't.

Barriers of Exclusion

When we start remote viewing, we instantly start breaking down the barriers of 'exclusion'. Our "won't" list starts to dissolve.

These barriers are not very selective. When we start 'opening our awareness', there's all kinds of stuff we may become aware of it. It may not be in-session, or about a target. It may not be 'factual' data; it could be esoteria. It may not even be a perception, so much as a bizarre life-synchronicity that brings a "weird feeling" that only intense deja-vu can compete with. If we are sitting in session and clearly 'hear' something at the target, we're happy about that. If we're sitting in our chair and clearly 'hear' something in an environ that at least part of our mind was wandering, we think we're hearing things and we're crazy. Well which is it?

Do we think that sound is different than smell? Maybe it's all energy and we merely "locally replicate" it using our brain-mapping; maybe at core there is no difference. Sight, sound, smell, even kinesthetics, as well as emotions, thoughts, etc. Anything can arrive, at any time. If we repress that awareness, we are contradicting our efforts at RV. If we accept it, we are looking at a much greater life-learning-curve than an hour of how to write impressions on paper.

Awareness is a rushing river of fluency and once you get it started, and you open that up in yourself, it can be addictive. It starts to feed you. You start to need that greater-awareness. It starts to seem like the lesser-awareness just isn't enough. It's not enough of you. You want more of yourself, of that feeling.

But it's enough to scare the hell out of your psychology, which after spending every minute since birth very clearly staking out the acceptable boundaries of reality, is now seeing you completely renege on what it learned so well.

The Personalized Universe

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 05 May 2006

A long time ago, an Atheist acquaintance (whom I'll call "A") was rambling on about how he felt people were a bit dim about the whole God thing. "It's an ingrained need of humans," A shrugged. "People need to believe in a higher power. They need something called "God". It doesn't even matter if the alleged god is nice or cruel, loving or terrifying, male or female. It doesn't matter if it offers eternal life or demands people die. As long as it's "more powerful" in their eyes, it fills the need."

I thought about this for a long time. I was studying theology at the time--a self-study, which I'd started the year before when I was age 15. The argument seemed like a fair one, all things considered. If I were to render all my seemingly spiritual experiences as something "real yet self-created," not removing their validity but removing any objectivity, and look at the concept of God not from my experience but as a theory, "humans innately need a God" seemed a philosophy difficult to argue, if I was honest.

One day I was looking at something that related somehow to Columbus, and the conditions on ships. My mind made an idle string of 'free associations,' and I ended up thinking of scurvy, the "sailor's sickness" so many died from, before they discovered that it was a profound lack of Vitamin C, easily curable with a few foods. As I continued to stare mostly-thoughtlessly into space, an observation stepped in from the back of my mind. It went something like this:

"You don't have an innate need for a thing unless that thing is part of the components of which you are made. Vitamin C deficiency would not cause Scurvy if Vitamin C were not an innate part of the earth we live on, the bodies we inhabit. You don't pine and die for what you've never had. Humans have an ingrained need for God because God is an innate part of what comprises a human being."

I believe this is the counterpoint to the first argument and I've yet to find one that offsets it.

o0o

When people wish to use visualization for something, whether it is for health meditations or ritual magick, the one thing absolutely necessary is that whatever they are focusing on, have some sort of specific representation for them. You cannot accomplish much by simply acknowledging that somewhere or everywhere in the universe there's some fuzzy energy field holding both the dark and light, for example. If your target-----whether remote viewing or prayer or magick is involved, doesn't matter----does not have a single point of focus, something you can 'have a relationship with', then your result doesn't have any "focus" either.

It helps little to render the "polarities" concept into impersonal neutrality. "There is no good and evil," I recall spouting when I was about 16. "There is only energy. Like a thermometer, it only reflects its usage. There is no objective state of good vs. bad. Only our arbitrary judgements about that." (Funny, it seemed only a philosophy to me at the time; now I see it as a political and cultural influence on me as well. The patronizing sneer this came with, whether from me or others, is the most defining characteristic of that model.)

Being sure of nothing but that "fuzzy impersonal universe," I began to lose 'cohesion' of my god-concept. God began dissolving around the edges for me. It wasn't enough that I was already whispering To Whom it may Concern in my prayers. Now, God was not only not personal, he wasn't even knowable, because he wasn't a thing, an it, or a He. A nebulous, fuzzy cloud-of-god was simply omnipresent.

o0o

When my husband was once possessed (seriously) by a grey-translucent "energy-sucking" thing, eventually, it nearly did me in. I had no lack of available tools, focus, strength, or handy deities. I had no lack of knowledge, and even warning by some QBL studying friends, of a particularly vulnerable cycle I was in. What I had, was an inability to make my inner psychic and outer logical lives meet in the middle. The psychic part of me recognized it openly as a singular threat. Alas the other part of me had a difficult time believing such a thing could be real, dismissing the other part of me with "probably imagination," and reducing the whole concept to some fuzzy netherland of "theoretically possible but seems highly implausible" universe that intelligent people, I felt, did not personalize and get paranoid about.

You cannot focus on something if it is not a thing for you, in some regard, even if that's only a concept-model.

You can't "singlemindedly concentrate" on anything that isn't, at least in usage-as-set, singular.

You know that stand-up joke, when someone says, "...don't take it personally!" And some guy says, "How am I supposed to take it, as a group??" Well, anything with which I need to have a relationship, needs to be personalized.

That's why we concentrate on the target in remote viewing, and not "the miniscule portion of the universe which is excluded from our query."

I suppose that's why "the devil" is singularized. On the far right god-ly side, it's a spiritual being. On the far left god-less side, it's the president. One way or the other, humans still perceive and experience what they feel is evil, they still project it, hunt it, etc. but they can only do this if they're personalizing it.

Because when it's an impersonal fuzzy cloud of energy with a spiritu-political neutrality, there is no relationship; there is no motivation; nothing.

o0o

The best way to render a person helpless to fight any given thing, personal, issue, trend, or circumstance, is to convince the person that it is not a "thing" they are fighting. Humans are reduced to numbers, as if much of the circumstance of reality carries some metaphysical sheild of incorporation, and there's a whole universe of "nothing personal".

In a movie recently, a man who kidnapped a whole family, was going to kill them etc., was asked by the teenager, "Why do you hate us?" and he said, "I don't hate you. I just don't care about you." And isn't that the reality that our world has been moving toward? Not of premeditated evil, but of sheer impersonal, conscience-less unconcern. If our neighbor is homeless it isn't our problem; if someone woman outside at night is raped we aren't involved; if someone loses their job of 40 years just before retirement, it's just business. If an executive orders something that causes great harm to environment, even death to people, it's just corporate business.

I once said in a media review that it's much easier to be killed with kindness. Or even alleged impartiality. Why? Because when someone is really overtly biased, readers perceive it, and they react defensively.

The key to keeping people from reacting defensively, is to disallow the situation to be personal; is to make sure any presentation does not exceed some "range" of alleged central neutrality. It doesn't matter how wrong, injust, or outright evil something is: if it's "nothing personal," one isn't expected to bother having any real opinion about it. Like death, taxes, and destructive acts of nature, we're expected to shrug, say "Bummer!" and move on.

o0o

I believe that humans may have an innate need to personalize things. I believe that actual success in many human endeavors is directly related to the person's ability to personalize something.

In dreams, when the "large feeling of ever-growing over-whelmingly dark feeling of BAD-ness" comes in, there is no real defense for it. But when those elements are personalized into an individual, we can fight that, or we can heal that, or other "personal relationship" results that let us, in short, DEAL WITH a certain energy, issue, circumstance, etc.

I am coming to believe that the apathy and impersonalization of our culture is its biggest danger to itself.

And I am coming to believe that having revised the concept of God from a personal relationship into some Grand New Age Ball Of Fuzzy Love And Light may be one of the more destructive things to actually happen to humanity's ability to "relate to" love and divinity.

It isn't that I think 'God' is, well, the guy on the cloud as embodied in the Christianity I grew up in. I actually am far closer to that fuzzy-ball-of-light philosophy than many folks who think they believe in that. But I think that lack of conscience and lack of concern for consequences is the spiritual Scurvy our culture has developed as a result of having had insufficient 'God' in their diet. You see the pattern in other ways as well, and the dissolution of a 'personal relationship with' someone you're supposed to behave better for, has the same effect.

I think losing "personalization," rather than recognizing this as a core need, has removed a great deal of the "emotional volition" that is one of the greatest powers and strengths of humanity.

I think this concept of personalizing things ties into remote viewing as well, but I think I'll address that another time.

It's Our Little Secret

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 03 May 2006

To some degree, excepting a few prolific extroverts like me, most viewers on the internet could almost be said to be "in the closet."

They read. They have an opinion. They view. (We assume.) But they have no desire to ever break out in song about it.

I've noticed that in other internet areas that are NOT Remote Viewing, people break out in song about every damn thing you can imagine. From doing laundry to evening traffic, from rock and roll to potato salad recipes, the one unavoidable thing about the internet is that there are millions of people who can talk about more subjects, at more length, than you have any interest in hearing about.

Except Remote Viewing.

Now, the viewing process is pretty interesting. Exasperating. From nebulous to stark clarity, from totally groovy to boring, sessions span the range of experience. You would think, in a niche-net of RV stuff on the www, that people would have some desire to spend a great deal talking about their actual viewing experience.

Why the heck not?

Why aren't there scores of viewers with blogs talking daily about their experience in session, and how it seemed like this but really was that, how it came through as this which was really neat and now you see meant that, and etc.?

On an internet filled with an astounding number of people who have actual interest in exploring the details of naval lint, it is just astonishing to me that more people don't talk about their actual experience with Remote Viewing.

I don't mean their opinions or theories, I mean session experience.

OK, maybe it's just me, but I find this really weird.

Ack!--uracy and Viewer Development

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 01 May 2006

You never count your money
When you're sittin' at the table
There'll be time enough for countin'
When the dealin's done.

I never met a viewer who didn't groove on being right. Whoa, won'tcha gimme that gut-level, spine-climbing euphoria of yes yes! Yes! YES! Yeeeehaw! when there's a target rocking inside you and the feedback hits outside you and the connection loop rushes through your body and makes ya feel bubbly-stoked inside for days (not to mention walking around grinning like an idiot for awhile right after).

Of course, every viewer learns the hard way that a hard-hit often equals a hard-punch to the ego on the next round. As I say, if there is one thing consistent about RV, it's the damnable inconsistency. Accuracy... is really just two, four letter words.

o~0~o

Many of the confusions in layman's RV about best-practice processes, stem from the fact that what is good for viewer development, is not always the same thing that is ideal for more developed viewers.

What you often hear talked about is what is 'ideal' -- like, if you were an expert and you were working an operational target, it should be done like XYZ. Or, if you were working at that level in science or applications over a long period of time, we would expect things to be done like so. Viewer profiling, for example. Session analysis. Or the many measures of "accuracy" that can arise. But the reality is that most people aren't experts and aren't working operational targets.

The most important goal going into a session is target contact. Not only for inside the session, for accurate data, but inside yourself, for the learning purposes during and after session.

You don't just learn from the outside; you also learn from the inside.

The target inside you has plenty to teach, not only in the session but afterwards in review, in dreams, and later -- days, weeks, months, years -- in more review.

Accurate data that you don't feel, and that comes through plainly, may not provide the same degree of learning as data that you have an actual "sense" for, even if it's wrong----at least if on feedback, you feel you know what went wrong with the accuracy.

Target contact is not really defined by what you "feel"----that does not always correlate with accuracy (and protocol violations like someone 'informed' in the room can increase the "kinesthetics" of a session)----but in an informal sense, it sure seems like it to me and many viewers I know. I do notice that sessions with a strong "feel" which are not accurate, at least in my case, are inclined to be completely off target. A really solid feeling of contact, for me, usually either means I was well on target, or well off target, or seriously in AOL drive, but it's likely to be one of those three; no casual conglomerate in the middle.

The "feel" of target contact can be so seductive, that many viewers would rather have a "so-so" session they really "experienced," than a great session they didn't really feel at all. The "feel" is the "fun" of Remote Viewing... the drug that'll get ya. Most the rest is a mental exercise.

There is a sense of responsibility and intimacy entwined with the "feel" of target contact. When you feel the target, it is your session, as if it's a work of art. It is your target, as if it's a friend----even if on some level, the target is horrid. It's personal. And it's permanent. You'll not forget it.

And sometimes, two full seconds of feeling solid target contact can give you more accurate, conceptual, relational, and sketchable information to go back and dig out of memory than another hour in session without that.

There is no middle ground on the subject of target contact. Without it you have no session at all. With total contact, you have what some call "full rapport" or "bilocation." 99.99% of all viewing is of course, somewhere between those two extremes.

A primary goal during the psychic 'experience' is to get as much target contact as you can without overwhelming yourself. That IS the information, is that "meeting in the middle," that intimate merge of you+target.

o~0~o

The ability to make target contact is what some scientists say doesn't change. A viewer's ability to get more data, better data, more advanced data, all those can be brought out through practice. But "how often, out of 500 targets, a viewer is likely to have clear target contact" is the variable that does not seem to change--not with all the viewers they've tracked, sometimes for decades.

Novice viewers, and those who work within systems that use wide-scope taskings and a lot of inferred sorts of feedback, may tend to feel that they are nearly always "on target," and it's only the details that vary. (By some standards, we are all "nearly omniscient.")

Research suggests that about 30% of the data presented in any session can be applied to about 30% of the possible targets. What this means is that a lot of viewers probably consider sessions "on target" that have "some accurate data" when really, the data is there as much by chance or a couple tiny 'spots of clue', than by any actual, decent, psychic target-contact.

If you "amplify" that effect by bringing in formal psi methodologies, this chance factor is raised even more. Some sessions have so much info in them, simply because the structure of the methodology requires the viewer record something, that they apply quite well to about 82% of all possible targets on Earth. Pretty hard to miss with that.

o~0~o

It's pretty difficult for a viewer to really clearly see when they are "solidly on or off target" until they start becoming solidly on or off target. Target contact isn't always strong, especially for novice viewers. There is plenty of wandering, guessing, incredibly ephemerally nebulous hoping going on in early sessions.

The more the viewer develops, the more they start to "feel" target contact. The more they start to feel it, the more specific they tend to be in their data. This means when they are on-target, it is not just a matter of low-level data having several matches; it is really obvious, that they are really "on-target".

And when they're off-target, it is just as obvious!

This often makes good viewers more insecure about showing their data than the average novice. (And not just because they have 'more to lose' with peers.) When a novice viewer misses a target, they're likely to have enough wishy-washy, 'broadly applicable' low-level data that it's a pretty subtle thing; one can probably stretch a few basic descriptives into 'possible' matches. But when a developed viewer misses a target, it's very likely that they are so completely off that they're going to be totally humiliated by it.

o~0~o

Concerning accuracy, the first basic is----the basics. You can read one of the Firedocs Remote Viewing Collection "FAQ" entries for info about accuracy. I give a few examples of different ways of measuring it, and point out that numbers are nearly always used to obfuscate in this field and you can't take anything seriously unless you know the protocol and know the measure.

There is another issue that only indirectly has to do with accuracy, but directly has everything to do with the viewer, which goes back to skill and hence accuracy (from the other direction). That is:

How you measure accuracy, should be greatly dependent on when you measure accuracy.

There are three basic kinds of when in my example:

1. When you are new to RV, or, when you are simply working on your practice, your development "in general" and ongoing;


2. When you are well into a viewer development cycle, getting good data fairly regularly, feel a sense of target contact pretty regularly, and want to start closing-in on specifically planning your practice around your skills (or lack thereof in some areas);


3. When you are fairly experienced, and getting closer to a skill level that would make applications workable, and would make an actual measure of your skillset needed.

And there is another, even-more-important kind of when:

After the session, vs. separately from the general viewing process.

o~0~o

Most viewers at point 1 are not feeling solid target contact regularly. They are still going through so many issues related to both target contact and communication, that you simply cannot take their data as a good example of anything except "their learning process." If they get a gender or a color wrong, it may not be because their target contact was ok but they weren't accurate; it's just as likely they either didn't have very clear contact to begin with, or that even they did, they may have so many other issues that what ends up on paper just isn't a real good example of what was inside them anyway. Yes, that's what we're learning, but on the early side of viewer development, it's a pretty nebulous process to begin.

A viewer at point 2 might be a viewer with a good deal of experience, who is expected to make decent target contact, but who wishes to review his data from multiple sessions, and consider what "type" of data is more inclined to be accurate vs. wrong. (In this example, we'll use the typical viewer profile database as an example: data is broken into components, noted as right/wrong/other-unk, and you end up with how 'much' of a certain type of data the viewer got, and how 'accurate' that type of data is for that viewer... and this combines over multiple sessions until you have something of an average, a curve.)

Aside from the variables in a session like analytical interference, for the most part the viewer has some kind of "process" down for their viewing. If they translate a certain kind of data wrongly, it may well be that their translation needs work, or that they need more experience on that kind of data. This kind of accuracy gauge (viewer profiling) can show you that, and you can begin gearing the taskings for the viewer toward data they need more experience with; and begin upgrading the complexity of tasking when working with data types they have a lot more fluency in.

Then there is the "how" it is measured.

As a first basic, all viewers no matter what their skill, if they're practicing, ought to have time for a session review. But to get to the more formal measures:

A viewer at point 3, would be similar to point 2 except that their evaluation might be better geared to a far more "specific" set of parameters. For example, let us take working on practice targets with photo feedback as the example, as it's the clearest: in point 2, the viewers are working on the focus of their feedback, which is a photo. Let us say that there is a church with a painted roofing and several people outside and some steps with railing and blue sky and some trees on the edge. Whatever data they get that matches that, is going to be accurate.

At point 3, the practice of the viewer should get more specific: whether a local live-feedback-as-target or a photo-feedback, bring the aperture down to something very specific. For example, the steps and the railing. That is the focus. You can remove the other info from the feedback or not, as you wish, but I suggest removing it. The viewer is then being judged on whether they accurately acquire very specific information. The range of "chance and accident" go down drastically at this point. We are no longer asking the viewer to describe an entire location and everything in it, which as anybody knows once they start evaluating sessions, is a lot more possibility for data than most folks think. We are now judging ONLY based on certain very key and specific information. This is going to greatly change the "accuracy percentage" resulting, even with the same viewer using the same accuracy measure----because the target's scope, the viewer's "aperture", narrowed dramatically.

o~0~o

The most important part of any discussion about accuracy needs to educate new viewers about this:

A practice session is a two-part process. The first part is the session. The second part is the session review. They go together.

"Session Review"

When a viewer finishes a session, the appropriate thing for him to be doing at that moment is looking at feedback, as soon as possible; concentrating on it, as intently as possible; and I recommend, mellowing out a little, and attempting to "get in rapport with it" to the extent possible (yes, even though you know what it is---of course). He should go through his session and attempt to revivify or remember-clearly, what the experience FELT like when a given piece of data came through. He should look at the feedback, not to see if "there is any match anywhere" intellectually, but to see if he can FEEL why that information piece came across, what it might relate to, and if it's not accurate, what feeling was misunderstood or ignored, that resulted in the error.

He should do this for his entire session. He should take his time. A practice session has two parts: the session itself, and the session review. That review needs to be in just as much a psychic, receptive state of mind as the session. Viewers can learned as much or more from session reviews than in-session, and that's the normal way of it, since that's when you have feedback, and you can try and make sense of the many subtle senses that came across and you had no idea how to articulate or what to do with. The psi and the receptivity should still be going on, in an ideal framework.

o~0~o

So let's go back to: How you measure accuracy, should be greatly dependent on when you measure accuracy.

Under no condition would I ever, ever, suggest that any viewer, especially a novice viewer, start databasing their sessions the minute they start viewing. (Just because someone teaches it to you, doesn't mean you have to start using it right away.)

First, as noted above, they are so much in a flux-learning state that expecting any data they get or don't get to have some profound significance is kind of beside the point. They just need to view. They aren't consistent enough even in the viewing process for the cumulative-session info to have a point. It's like taking five pieces of nearly-random data. When you combine them all, all you have is one piece of nearly-random data that is five times as big.

Second, remote viewing takes time, and since most humans have jobs and family (aka "a life"), it's important the time they DO have be spent doing something useful. Down the road, when their process and data flow is more regular, they can step into more detailed, multi-session evaluation. Initially, it's just a bunch of time distracted from actual viewing and related processes.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Math is not a related process to viewing. The 'session review' goes through each data point in the way it should be done. Finishing the session and then, instead of that session review, launching into a run-through as viewers excitedly tally up their 'points' and do the math for it all to come up with some number that makes them feel happy, is a complete distraction from one of the most critical learning-potential moments of the process.

Third, there is a strong tendency for left-brain types to be drawn to remote viewing, and this is a little too Kether----by that I mean, after-session is a moment where they really need to be focusing on the session, feedback, and allowing it----not distracting themselves into math, which the most left-brain types will LOVE doing, until you find them spending 10 minutes on a session and an hour on their "accuracy worksheet" and eventually you start realizing they're spending more time on math than viewing, and more time focused on numbers rather than process.

Fourth, novice viewers are still working on the first basics; they are not yet to a point where they have a "sense of self" as a viewer, a little confidence from a sufficient amount of past success, and very importantly, a sense of what matters about a given practice task. When you dump these viewers into instant-accuracy evaluation, it can distort the data collection process from that point on.

The viewer may first began to "pad" their results. If they say "shiny," they will also decide they should say "light, bright, gleaming, reflective...". Golly, look at all those extra data points... and so accurate! (I've yet to see many targets in which you cannot, by some grace, find a way to consider data like that accurate.)

Then, the viewer may start to CYA against possible inaccuracy. They may start to say, "a man" because they sense a man, and instead they back up and say, "biological. human. male." and so on. Ding! More data points! And, a greater "span" of data which better ensures something might be correct (and less thread of incorrect, or at least as MUCH incorrect).

(In order to explain why perceiving a man is not an analytical "overlay" construct unless you made other data into "man", I'd have to devolve into a talk about AOL. Not this post. Some other time.)

When "accuracy judgement" (not to be confused with the every-data-point "session review" noted above) is tied to novice viewers, it becomes an albatross of attitude and it begins training them literally toward the wrong focus. The focus is not how many data points you get; the focus is not how many of those points are right; that is a math game, not viewing!

The focus is always Target Contact. Everything else follows from there.

o~0~o

The first viewer-measure of accuracy is the viewer's own session review. That review-point is literally the whole point of doing a practice session. To lead to that! Data is only the point of the session when you are working for science, show or application. Learning is the point of the session when you are practicing.

So WHEN is any "accuracy measure," outside the given of a session-review, appropriate?

1. When the viewer has become consistent enough that taking the time to put multiple session results together in a database, for an average, will have some actual meaning.

2. When the viewer has enough experience to have some sense-of-self as a viewer, and will not be distracted by the measuring process in a way that distorts their later viewing process.

3. When the viewer is solid enough in the creative and flexible viewing process that they aren't vulnerable to using math as a shield----a process they feel far more confident about than viewing.

And WHEN should such "accuracy measure" be carried out?

Any time that is NOT CONNECTED TO the viewer's session process.

If performed after a session, even after a session review, there is a high tendency for the process to speed up to move toward the end-goal, which in this point instead of being the review, becomes the math.

If performed wholly separately as a process, this provides the added benefit of a totally separate time and state of mind that may see something in the data/session that you didn't see initially.

o~0~o

So next time you find yourself in a discussion about accuracy, bear in mind the options. Are the numbers for application purposes? Are the numbers for viewer-development purposes? Or are the numbers being collected on novice viewers where they take more time to collect than the result is even worth?

Numbers at the intermediate level can be collected, but shouldn't be considered to mean a lot for "viewer comparison" reasons given the scope of the targets. They can mean something for viewer development, of course.

Numbers at the advanced level should only be considered in the light of highly specific targets, preferably with tasking that clearly requests certain information. So you are really only measuring whether or not a viewer got very specific information. Those sorts of numbers, you can compare.

Target contact matters more than numbers. Focus on the target contact and the numbers will take care of themselves.

Basic Edu and RV Lite

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 29 April 2006

Nobody ever argues with the Periodic Table of Elements.

And I never heard anybody question why, when you use a neutral water base in chemistry, it should be pure.

Nobody disputes these things. The reasons are self-evident to all, with a minimum of consideration.

Ah, but those are basic factoids entrenched in "academia."

That is to say, the forced-schooling our government loves so much.

Which now takes 12-14 years to turn out a surprising number of people less educated than the average 11 year old of a century ago. (Only government could accomplish that, I suppose. Though to hear John Taylor Gatto tell it, it's more conspiratorial than mere incompetence.)

If chemistry were blacklisted from academia the way psi research is, maybe people would question such things all the time. "Mendeleyev has his opinions, and I have mine," they might say. "Nobel was a smart guy, but what has he done for us lately?" And: "Nobody I know thinks pH really matters." And: "Well you know the professors are just trying to keep control of things."

Maybe there'd be folks selling 'certificates' in chemistry, telling people pure water "only matters in the lab."

And, saying if anything without pure water ever has the same end-result, then truly-neutral "must not matter."

And, selling "Chemistry" that omits even the mention of the science details' existence... --- beyond, of course, claiming that science "validates" whatever test-tube Delight they're selling.

---

When basic education is lacking in a certain area, all knowledge after that is skewed.

When a word is not understood by the listener, all the info after that is skewed.

When the audience is starting from zero, a preliminary foundation is necessary.

Otherwise, it's building houses on sand. Everything only seems right... for awhile.

When the walls come tumbling down, or when all attempts to build any floor above the first one fail, the sincere owner, who worked hard for that house, is going to be righteously irked about the information they didn't get from the expert house builder they paid to teach them "house building." Of course, the expert house builder may say, and be quite right, "I only agreed to teach you how to build a house. I was not engaged to teach you anything about foundations." True. But they knew the issues of foundation existed. It would have been such minimal effort to say, "This issue matters."

---

Many people do not know what a science protocol is. There are official definitions but let me provide my version: A science protocol is the sum total of all rules, situational factors and planned processes which, as a group, are used for a given science experiment.

Now, within that big "set" of stuff, there may be lots of processes. If the subject is chemistry, there might be rules about your ingredients; there might be rules about how ingredients are combined, down to detailed stuff like how to pour things from one beaker to another; there might even be rules about the type of equipment used, what is done with substances after the experiment, and more. There might be rules about how information is recorded. There might be rules about how to measure the results.

If referring to only some of the elements within an overall protocol, it's often referred to as "the protocols"--the rules, whatever part of the rules you happen to be talking about at the time. If referring to "all" the rules, you usually use the singular form of the word, and say "The protocol."

Psychic functioning done within a Remote Viewing protocol contains some basic elements, though details around them vary. I'm going to copy (and slightly improve) something I posted at TKR recently as there's no point in rewriting it.

These components comprise primary "points of an appropriate remote viewing protocol":
1. Deliberate, active psychic functioning (e.g. not spontaneous or random)
2. Controlled against non-psi info transfer (e.g. in a doubleblind, at least to the info-points being requested)
3. Session data recorded (e.g., documented and secured for the record)
4. Feedback obtained (and compared with session data to evaluate accuracy)

If the data was accurate, then you could say it was genuinely psi-derived info, or to be formal about it, the way to say it is that if you get feedback, compare to session data, and determine the data was accurate, and the target was set up on purpose, and all non-psi forms of data transfer were prevented, then: "A successful remote viewing has taken place."

If the data was wrong, then you have no idea what its source might be. Imagination?, who knows.

If the above points of protocol were not in place, then you don't really know whether (or how much of, or what-of) the data was transferred or inferred by the psychic through non-psychic means. Since we have to compare to feedback to even know it is truly "psychic" in origin, then there is no point to considering feedback a validation if your collection process is likely polluted.

---

If the type of psi format is 'free response' (e.g., not card-guessing), and it is performed within an appropriate remote viewing protocol, then officially it can be called Remote Viewing.

By "default", the psychic may simply "open their mind" for the occasion and record whatever occurs to them.

If the psychic has some systematic "personal process" for attempting to perceive, understand, decode, and communicate the information, as an attempt to control the process and increase accuracy, then the situation would be a form of CONTROLLED remote viewing.

There is no rule that you have to use "someone else's method" for your process. You can use, or create, any method you like. The only measure of the value of doing this, will be your results of course. Swann's CRV (and its various derivatives in the field today) were specifically geared to address exactly that area. How well they do so seems to depend on the person and the investment.

---

It was psi being performed within an RV protocol that gave us what legitimacy the RV term ever had.

Scientists have long said, "To be legitimately 'remote viewing', it must be performed within a Remote Viewing protocol." They meant, the science protocol and all its elements. "Method" (the viewer's hands-on process) were one point of that protocol; it could be set for one certain method, or left open for the viewer to decide.

But the media you hear will usually refer to someone who is saying they teach "the Remote Viewing protocols." They mean a psychic method. That may be legitimate, but it is just one part of the larger protocol. If they don't use that method within a proper Remote Viewing protocol, then it's just the method... not Remote Viewing.

It is up to viewers to educate themselves. Methods-trainers may do a fabulous job of teaching a good method in some cases, but more education is required for the overall subject. We would not expect one advanced math class to make a person an engineer, after all. Any serious subject---and I take Remote Viewing pretty seriously---requires more than a few days of inquiry.

---

Many people cannot understand the difference between a method (sometimes called "protocols" which is a bit confusing to the public) and a science protocol.

You cannot compare a methodology (e.g., "CRV") to "An RV Protocol" because the protocol is so much bigger. The methodology would just be one part of it.

Here is a quick overview, a visual example I posted at TKR to try and map out how things fit together. Click the image to view the page in context.

May I just repeat for the record:

It was psi being performed within an RV protocol that gave us what legitimacy the RV term ever had.

It was psi being performed outside the protocol but "still called RV" that gave us Hale-Bopp and 47 other varieties of lunacy, cultism, bogus claims and media marketing madness.

If anybody serious about understanding remote viewing learns only one thing, it ought to be what makes RV distinctive.

It isn't just one thing that does it; any of the protocol points (including method) may be used on their own, or in different situations. It is the combination of all those things at once, together with free-response format of psi functioning, that makes RV distinctive.

Add to this a conscious, dynamic process where the viewer attempts to better understand, be aware of, and control the psychic experience, and you have something worth taking seriously.

Talk about informal education

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 19 April 2006

Although I grant I've had an obsession with science for most of my life, dating back to voracious reading of everything about (or from) George Washington Carver and J.B. Rhine in my school years, it really doesn't get any better than the last near-decade or so, when thanks to my incursion into the study of Remote Viewing and its science, history, theory and practice, I've met a whole bunch of very cool people who are both brilliant and down to earth.

One of my faves is Dr. Edwin C. May, aka Eddie when nobody else is around, who over the years has taken a lot of time to be kind to an uncredentialed but very serious layman with a million questions.

He recently got Skype "video" -- wow! It's so cool!! (No. You will never, ever see me on this. -- I'm shy!) -- and today when he skype-ftp'd a quick run of a graph of current rough prestim research results, and an explanation of it all to boot, I just couldn't resist grabbing a screenshot to show y'all. Now I was tempted not to post this, since it sounds a bit like name-dropping, but then decided what the hell, this is my daily life and this is my blog and they go together, right?

Anyway, with great guys like him willing to be virtual-professors now and then, how can the science of psi NOT be interesting? Now if only I had all the requisite braincells and background math to absorb it, I'd be better deserving I imagine. But at least I don't lack enthusiasm, heh! (Thus demonstrating my long-held theory on social chivalry: that if one can't be useful, they can at least be decorative. Or in my case, perhaps, at least supportive!)

(Thanks for permission ECM. Yeah, next time I'll warn you so you can pose!)

The Absense of Alice

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 19 April 2006

When I opened the TKR project, the "open and welcome to everyone" part nearly caused me physical pain. It meant I would have to be diplomatic or silent in any TKR area about anybody who had a board on the project's forum. It meant I would be seeing my own media, my own money, my own project, used for stuff I couldn't stand, by people I couldn't tolerate.

I figured nobody would be dense enough to avoid free reference, links, opportunity to present their marketing. I also (boy was this idealistic!) thought nobody would be so crass as to indirectly harm their own viewers, by not at least having the same space for them in the one community-wide project everyone else had, no matter how they personally felt about anybody in it.

I figured I was doomed. It'd be my money, my time, my work, and they'd benefit, and while the "greater field of RV" and TKR itself might be a little better off for having them, on the whole, it's more loss to an individual group to lose our link, than it is for us to lose their participation; thanks to Firedocs and the McEagle site, TKR has guaranteed incoming web traffic.

Some proved me right: In the case of PSI TECH and Jonina for example, she's no slouch at P.R. (one of her ex-'s is actor Brad Dourif, ref: Lord of the Rings). It wouldn't matter if I was offering an ad on my tombstone, if it was free, a useful internet link, and spelled the name right, she'd be smart enough take it. But for the most part she was the only one; we worked hard to get most others involved even passively.

Whether because they don't want their followers exposed to any idea outside their glory, or whether they don't care about traffic to their website, or the media being more likely to see what they do, who knows. One thing was sure: few gave a flying pig about "supporting the larger community" by putting aside personal issues, as I and others were doing, to make one safe central ground.

But the people who could have got the most out of this, and who most made it feel like dental surgery to me to have to offer it to them, wouldn't join! Which is really a funny irony. Those who like me the least, and could have done me the worst, didn't. By letting their personal pique influence their professional decisions, they did me a favor of sorts, though at the expense of themselves, their viewers, and the greater RV community:

They lost out on a great opportunity for their own side, made it publicly clear they had no good concern for the field at large outside their own clique, made me look altruistic for inviting them, made themselves look retentive for refusing or ignoring, and skipped the chance to use MY money & media to make their own benefits... and make my teeth grind in the night.

Sometimes, the universe is just alright.

Entangled Hands

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 18 April 2006

Demonstrating a very different kind of entanglement on a California sunny day, here's a photo of Dr. Edwin May (physics) and Dr. Dean Radin (electrical engineering) outside of IONS, April 18, 2006.

Dr. Radin has a new book just released, Entangled Minds : Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality [website] [[amazon.com] [quotes about it], which I imagine is going to add to the waterfall of drool I see invoked instantly in the public and media over anything containing the Oooh-Aaah word "quantum."

I should mention that Radin's previous book, The Conscious Universe : The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena [website] [amazon.com] was a fabulous read. So I expect this book will be as well.

(Thanks to the good docs for permission to post this photo.)

A Sneak Peek at Ed & Stephan

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 16 April 2006

Groovy pic eh? April 16, 2006.

At left, in the shirt louder than New York, is physicist Dr. Edwin C. May, who is very conservative about psi and science (and not about much else). Then at right, looking suspiciously laid back (if not downright conservative... next to Ed!) is Stephan A. Schwartz, who by nature is as dynamic (particularly about psi) as Ed's shirt.

Dr. May's currently working on physiologically (cardio) measured pre-stimulus-response trials. This means, "The experiments where they demonstrate, by measuring your heart rate compared to random sounds, that precognition [read: being psychic about the future] exists."

Schwartz will be speaking at the upcoming IRVA Conference (ref: Remote Viewing) in early May.

(Thanks guys for letting me post the pic!)

(This adding real-time stuff like photos is complicating my posting on past-dates, isn't it! Well as long as I keep it straight enough that I don't post a picture on a date prior to its being taken, I think I'm safe...)

Stalking the Target

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 12 April 2006

"There are three kinds of people in the world: those who are immovable, those who are movable, and those who move." -- Anon.

There are those who do not consciously become aware of psi in their experience. Since I believe that psi is the fundamental of our atomic existence, as well as the fundamental of a "consensus reality" being possible at all, then obviously I do not believe they lack 'psi'; that is like lacking molecules or something, it's impossible for a physical-human-in-our-perceived-biological-bandwidth. I believe they just lack awareness of it.

There are people who do become aware of it, albeit spontaneously, accidentally, in dreams, and so on. Even some psychics fall into this category, if they are the more casual, "whatever grooves through me" sort.

And there are people who proactively, consciously attempt to become more 'aware', to maintain 'awareness' and integrity down to the very thought, and in some cases, to practice Remote Viewing. Those aren't the same, of course. Some people attempt to be 'aware', and some attempt to have great 'integrity' even in thought, and some practice Remote Viewing, and those may be three different people. Or not. Most serious viewers qualify for the first and the third. Whether or not they take that farther into the middle depends on the person.

---

Psychic functioning prior to RV was often presented as a severely passive exercise. You got comfortable and mellowed out and asked your question and opened up to the universe and whatever went past you, that was your data.

Much of the inaccuracy in standard psychic work hasn't been only because the psychic was trying to make data A into data B, but because the psychic really WAS focusing on being "open to the universe," which is substantially larger in scope than most targets. Remote Viewing drastically improved the 'target definition' spectrum.

Psychic functioning in Remote Viewing, once Swann-derivative psi methods had been promulgated to the greater world by hill, rooftop and late-night radio, were an "active-distraction" exercise, though the details of this depended on the Acronym of the Moment and your trainer. In general, you got comfortable and followed that paint-by-number plan reallyreallyfast, in the hopes that by distracting yourself, you'd be getting yourself out of the way, so that when you were finished, what was left on paper would be dominantly accurate, this rating mostly depending on how much of you had target contact ("IN" the way) and conscious distraction ("out of the way").

This is similar to counting backward as you are inducted into hypnosis: "if my conscious mind is busy over there, my subconscious here will be free." This emphasis has been stronger in TRV training than most CRV training, I should note. Most people find this "move through it fast" approach actually does work as intended.

Given the methodology mostly instructs you to ask for info, write down every single tiny piece, move on fast and keep moving (...which I do find workable in a rather bean-counter-trained-to-be-psychic sort of way), the distraction technique goes pretty well with it.

---

But that whole framework is a nice analogy, as my buddy EricT once pointed out, to the "distraction vs. focus" models in personal training, like bodybuilding or top-quality sports. (This is now me explaining, but the original surface-idea came from him.)

There are people who go into the gym in their cute spandex and they get on a machine of some form and they turn up the MTV and distract themselves as much as possible while they exercise. And that works, for the average person, whose primary goal of exercise is NOT the process, feeling, or focus on the exercise, but a side effect of it, which is that it happens to contribute to looking good in spandex.

But on the other side of the spectrum are the people who do certain kinds of exercise or weight training not just as a "practice on purpose" but as a very serious "way" or "focus" or "personal exploration." And that's a whole different thing. You won't find these sorts "distracting themselves" to make time pass and avoid boredom or avoid "messing it up by paying attention." Instead, they actually focus on what they are doing. The actual process, and all the many subtle details of how they feel during that process, are very important to them.

It's not that either way is better. It's just that different people have different reasons for doing things.

The professional bodybuilder has to care about the subtle feelings in his neck when he lifts. It matters that he feels a pull slightly more on one side than another, even if it's subtle. It matters not only because his ability to adjust-within-process is affected, and not only because his process may be more in-depth than some others, but because he must treat his body as a very living, interacting-thing. It's a form of communication.

The spandex crowd doesn't care about the subtleties their body wants to communicate; they care about sweating for 20 minutes to Oprah and moving on. It was never really the focus on their body as a living part of them to interact with, as both friend and self, that mattered; it was a focus on the side-effects of exercise, like their hip size and energy level and so forth. And those are good things to care about, and they matter.

But getting to know your body in the way that a serious martial artist or bodybuilder or high-pro sports athlete does, is a completely different thing.

---

Remote Viewing has that kind of dynamic as well.

There are the unmovables, the seemingly non-psi sorts, who are the Les Nessman's of our consensus psychic-reality: This line I drew is a wall. Get it? It's a wall. I can't see you! You can't see me! There's an invisible WALL here!

There are the movables, the seemingly psi-by-accident types, and sometimes the psi-by-casual-allowance types. If they practice a methodology they call remote viewing, they either breeze through without any larger protocol (tasking-scopes that span a lightyear, feedback-scopes that you can fit in a thimble), or sometimes breeze through the entire process as if it's entirely literal and devoid of need for (or permission for) attention.

Then there are those who move. Controlling your remote viewing is not about some guy's doctrine or some other guy's method, although such things can be shared and may be useful. (If properly understood. Which in the case of Swann's work is in my opinion the far bigger problem: it's not that much of his stuff isn't downright brilliant or insightful, it's that a lot of people distill it into a simplistic, dualistic, stereotype-level of comprehension which sells well to the masses but is downright inane to try and apply to the complexity of this topic.)

It's also about a state of internal commitment which allows a conscious process-experiment with 'awareness' that can't really be approached without that inner anchor of acceptance. I once wrote, in Bewilderness,

All acceptance is by faith. Not blind faith as "trust," but faith as an absolute commitment, and when you make the latter, you realize it is the former.

The initial focus and quest for data, and the initial "opening up to" information, this little portion is always the feminine, is always the receptive (not-quite-'passive').

But once it flows into you, it becomes part of you. And once it's part of you, it really IS a part of YOU. And because it's part of you, it's alive. Because it's part of you, it can communicate. It's a thought-form, and when resident within you, has the motive-power that you lend it.

---

There is a difference between processing data in a way that attempts to conclude what it is or belongs to, which is baaaaad, and processing data that recognizes its nature and attempts to discern more about it, which is necessary if you intend to have data of real depth at some point, or any clue what the hell you're doing.

For example, some data is symbolic. When you know that, you don't write it down as a literal, and it's not an AOL, either; you go to the data on the spot and figure out what it's trying to tell you. Much data is, itself, communicative. Data may move, morph, merge and separate, and all of these things are themselves a form of data.

Data may come across in a variety of ways and that itself is a form of information, often about the data. There is even a whole genre of data that is about the session, the viewer, the process. You can 'program' in data-forms that are about the feedback, about custom process. There are no limits.

Sometimes, you have to stalk the target. You have to go out and get it. You have to follow the funky and often bizarre and surreal dance inside you to where it leads, find its home, discern its reality, and that's your data.

It's a vastly bigger world than "go real fast and write down whatever comes across until you're done." It's a completely different experience in many respects. It's the [pink spandex] version vs. the [highly attentive martial arts bodybuilder listening to subtleties of his body] version.

It's alive. It's proactive. It's dynamic. It's not passive. It may be receptive, but it's also quite active... and interactive.

Which is a whole 'nuther post. Or book. If I'd quit typing here, and start typing there!

Degrees of Psi & Creativity

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 11 April 2006

In the creative worlds, there are "degrees" of creativity not just within an individual, but within the "style" of a given creative art.

Let us take computer graphic design for example.

• At its lowest level, there are people who may take an existing template, let us say one provided by a newsletter or website template, and choose colors, fonts, and content to move around.


• Next up, there may be people who take some of those template elements, but creatively mess with them to combine, move around, totally change, etc. those elements in a graphics program (such as PhotoShop).


• Then, there may be people who custom-create their own design elements, based on certain basics like titles, navigation, etc., but within those parameters the work is wholly custom.


• Then, there are people who create designs from scratch, meaning the entire page, website, etc. etc. becomes one larger "creative architecture" of design and also has another "dimension," in that it is both including programming, 3rd party technologies, and accounting for the content which will go inside it.


• Then somewhat sideways of that, but pushing outward further, are designers who aren't dealing with the additional rules/factors of the technology and environment, but instead are going forward into more extensive design. Let us say that they create Java or Flash based "animated" design, which is a different kind of "dimension" added to the creative mix, and which may have much more 'open boundaries' on what can be designed -- at this point it now includes "dynamic motion, relationships, audio" as well as the visuals -- as if tic-tac-toe has been upgraded now to chess.


• Further beyond that, we have some of the "cinematic engineers" in design, 3D cinematics (e.g., the opening for 'World of Warcraft' game, by Blizzard's awesome designers).


• Then off to the side again, outside of whether or not technology is involved at all, we have totally creative artists who may do anything from surreal photography to abstract art to novel sculpture, things that may be totally unlike anything any of us have ever really seen; a full-spectrum creativity with almost no limits at all except the form in which it's developed.

All of these things are creativity. Clearly, some require "more" creativity than others; some require a lot more technical or artistic skill than others; but at root, it is all creativity. And, if used in the proper format, at the proper time, all of them have value.

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The reality is that some people are better able to do some things than others.

And, some people actually have their creativity 'sparked' by situation -- such as the web technical and content parameters -- to go where it would not have gone without that. Some people can work with zero parameters and create like crazy, vs. some who don't create at all in that environment; whereas others feel oppressed by parameters, vs. some who use them almost as counterweights, the way you 'push off' a diving ramp.

In the psychic world, there are "degrees" of psi not just within an individual, but within the "style" of a given psychic art.

Some of the degree relates to the 'bandwidth' of data. Dowsing, for example, may be a simple 'feeling' that a line or map is warm or has a pull. That is a pretty narrow bandwidth of feeling/info. Early Remote Viewing may tell you only that the target contains water.

Some of the degree relates to the 'specificity' of info. Dowsing, for example, may be able to tell you it's on the left side of the map, but really good dowsing will give you a range of geographical coordinates. Remote viewing, for example, may be able to tell you that something is a natural environ with trees and some manmade structures; or, it may be able to describe a target in such amazing detail (including material composites, dimensions, etc.) that the session breaks another chunk off your belief system and you need a drink after you see it.

Some of the degree relates to the 'depth' of info. In dowsing that can be almost literal, but may include concepts, relationships, and more about what you're dowsing for and its location. Remote Viewing may bring in concepts, history, future, and even metaphysics.

Some is just about the kind of info your art brings you. Some are more specific, some are more conceptual, etc.

And some relates to the 'type and degree' of info. Whether someone can tell you the psychological state and intentions of an individual, is a rather different thing than whether they can tell you the target is made of stone. Maybe on some grand metaphysical level, all information is just information, and OBL's plans are no different than a golf game or a skyscraper or a business letter or a fish, but in the real world one is as different from the other as advanced cinematic engineering (and its product) is from choosing the font and color on your newsletter template.

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It has been my experience that just because a person is not really comfortable operating creatively in a formless environment, does not mean they can't be creative or useful. Maybe it is the same for psi.

There are some people who, no matter what kind of RV rain-dance you teach them, are not going to be truly excellent remote viewers in the way that most of us hope for remote viewing. I know that nobody wants to hear this. I know that half the online RV field will probably hate me for saying that. And I know that a huge number of people have the wailing feeling already that they don't want to waste their time on doing something daily for three years "just to see" if they have any ability. They will almost pay for encouragement (wait, they WILL pay for encouragement, by way of this-method-will-make-you-expert). But it would be unreasonable to think that everybody is going to work with the same "degree" of psi. It does not work that way for art, for music, for ANY skill come to think of it (not even basketball!) -- so why on earth should it be that way for RV?

That doesn't mean there is no application for what they can do, their style, their degree of talent, whatever.

It occurred to me this morning that maybe psi should be viewed by this light. Maybe if we really cared about making the most of psi, we would be exploring it in this way: accepting as a no-brainer that the options for remote viewing are not just "world-class vs. incompetent" but that there's a whole spectrum of "degree" of skill, and building opportunities to work with whatever you've got.

In the world that relates to graphic design, there is no assumption that we are all extremely free-form creative artists with 3D CAD and cinematic skills. Get real. So, there are endless amounts of props and programs and photos and scripts and plugins and buttons and templates and more that you can use or tap into or modify as needed. The world has many opportunities for me to use what creativity I have, what technical skills I have, what inspiration, time or opportunity I have, to create -- in whatever degree -- something.

Why can't it be like that for RV?

Rather than only attempting to help individuals reach a level of fairly advanced remote viewing skill, which leaves us with very few individuals and a very long learning curve of time, what if we also sat down and thought about ways that we could apply far lesser-degrees of skills to something practical?

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As one off the cuff example, let's take the coming TKR Predict-This! utility. Anybody will be able to enter anything that they think would be fun for people to make predictions about. Let's say we enter a sporting event. The person who enters it, needs to enter all the 'options' (and there's always a default 'other'/null option). Anybody -- viewer, team, educated guesser, or coin-flipper -- can enter a prediction just for the hell of it. The system hides the predictions until the time of the event (so folks can't ride each others bets, and so old votes don't influence the incoming votes). (And like all TKR tools, it allows anonymity.) When it's done, we have stats from the minor to the major that will accumulate.

It may turn out that on a psychic level, most of us don't give a damn about the motion of the stock market, not even inside ARV, but we really care about court cases and sporting events and elections. Or it may vary by the person.

It may turn out that the guy who couldn't remote view his way to his front door with eyes open, has a helluva knack for just getting a feeling about which of several candidates will win an election anywhere in the world. How will we KNOW this, if we don't build something that is big enough, open enough, that anybody can play in it, that everybody -- even those who psychic skills are completely unknown (or not well developed) -- have a chance to work with the type or degree of psi they may have?

And if, using the coming TKR Zeniverse (RV Groups) software, taskers occasionally give someone an aspect of say, a sporting event, that is basic-level data, so that even fairly novice viewers are just as likely to get that kind of data as experts are the larger things -- might it turn out that properly managed, even a very rudimentary level of psi skills could be utilized to good effect?

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If we waited for everybody who played basketball to become NBA-quality before we started utilizing their skills or taking them seriously, the NBA wouldn't even exist, because nobody would have worked their way up to that level using "real world" competition and demands. I believe it is the same for psi.

I believe we -- by "we" I mean, "the people in remote viewing who give a damn, and want to see the field move forward" -- need to come up with some ways to provide opportunity, encouragement, fun, applications, etc. for any and all degrees and types of psi. Find a way for at least middling-novices to apply their skills.

Whether someone is a little psi or a lot; whether they are skilled or novice; whether they use remote viewing, dowsing, tarot, channeling, who cares?? What matters is that they have a chance to apply whatever they've got, work with it, experiment, play, learn and grow and improve.

And along the way we might discover that you don't need to be as good as Joe McMoneagle to get some good out of Remote Viewing, which is a lucky thing, since how many people ever will be?

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! :-)

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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!)

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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."

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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.

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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:

1. AOL causing the whole spectrum of distortion factors resulting in what I generically call "affected data"


2. data that is incompletely translated


3. data that is incorrectly translated


4. data that is just flat-out wrong, but by this I mean pieces within a session


5. 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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

Sessions & Misc.

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 09 April 2006

Sessions have had the coolest visuals lately.

I saw a guy, so intensely clearly that if I ran into him in Walmart next week I would recognize him (and I'm not good with faces, so that's really saying something). He was east indian ancestry it appeared, but an American I surmised. He was sitting on a firm couch with something on his lap he was writing on. He was well dressed, very cleancut, with back-length hair pulled back in a firm ponytail, which was curly. I watched him for a few moments, marveling at the clarity of it. It was just like 'being there' except there was no 'peripheral' vision, just him and the part of the couch and floor he occupied. Finally, from across the room I said, "Wow! I can SEE you!" -- and he looked up in astonishment!

Judging by the look on his face, I'd say he either saw me or saw something anyway, and obviously heard me. Then I had that sense he was actually remote viewing (of all things -- I mean, maybe that's not unusual I'd tune into him given that, but how many humans are likely to be viewing at the same time??), and I said, "Oh my god! Are you viewing?!" and went to his side (sorta flew-instantly) and looked down at what was on his lap. But he moved quickly, like in a fear-reaction, as if to snap close something or hide it -- and then I was staring at my session paper. I was thinking hmmn, I will know him if I meet him, I think that was real, and I don't think it has anything to do with the target.

Not the first time I've seen people in session (whether a target or something spontaneous), though sometimes I just sense-hear them when that kind of thing happens. If I think to ask for a name I usually get it but I was so delightedly-astonished I forgot to ask, damn it! Of course, somewhere, some innocent guy is probably thinking, YOU SEE? EVIL ALIEN GOVERNMENT MINIONS ARE SPYING ON ME! and it's all my fault.

In a diff session on a volcano two neat data format came across. The first was a sense of kundalini. I'd never thought of this before but when you consider it, volcanoes being the kundalini of the earth makes sense. The second was this very vivid (but I knew not-quite-literal) vision of a sort: there was some 'morpheous' (changing and not clearly defined shape at bottom, seeming fuzzy or liquidy or moving) shape at the bottom, and then something tall that went up high--I shallow-aol'd antenna, knife blade, etc. -- but then there were these great, totally round, lightning-type-EM energy bolts that went up it, one after the other. It looked just like something out of a science fiction movie, it was great.

Sometimes the session experience is worth more than the data. Heh. OK a lot of the time. Still...

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A friend PEM'd me and pointed out that almost indirectly, in my post from the 7th I said something nice about Jonina and Glenn in the same paragraph. They were suggesting that this means hell has finally frozen over. Really all it means is that I recognize efforts in RV. I don't have to always agree with someone or even get along with them to see objectively that they are doing what they believe in and they're working hard at it.

I sometimes have the feeling that on some level we are really all in this together, and that when we die we're all going to realize that we were on the same team, and if we'd spent less time dissing or avoiding each other we all could have accomplished more. This reminds me of the time back in '97 or so when I was so pissed off about something in the RV field that I can't even remember now, I fell into OBE by accident and hunted down Courtney Brown to "share my perspective," aka just kick his butt. I was surprised at his spunk in fighting back, given that patronizingly soft little sotty voice he wears in the physical that always makes me want to punch him in the head every time I hear him on the radio. It ended up quite the Crowley-esque experience and by morning I was thinking that ever telling anybody would require instant ritual suicide for my honor, but now I think it's just an example of the fact that whatever we do, say, think, etc. on the surface, may not really be the whole story and there's probably a lot of spiritual stuff that means more, and is less petty, underneath.

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I do still dream about Mars, I admit. But that's probably just an archetype. Not about RV...

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Lately I've been practicing a little more energy rapport than usual. I sure do miss hands-on work. It feels like I'm living in a canyon here, metaphysically, and it's been so long since I did any regular eWork I can hardly even feel my chakras anymore, most the time.

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Well it's time to get up. I'd rather stay in bed. Of course, in order to stay in bed, first you have to go to bed. I'm late. Gotta view first, so I can say I made time to do at least one session yesterday.

TinWiki and Remote Viewing Research

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 08 April 2006

I added the below text to the tinWiki (wiki wearing a tinfoil hat! hilarious!) that abovetopsecret.com sponsors.

Since I figure any moment some bonehead will come along and delete it all and replace it with how Ed Dames is Keeper Of The Flame, I thought for posterity I'd copy it into my blog. Then if I ever need to refer to the info I won't have to retype it.

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The world's largest online archive of peer-reviewed research papers regarding remote viewing (and many other topics paranormal, anomalous, and alternative) can be found at the LEXSCIEN Library of Exploratory Science, including half a century of journal archives and many other forms of media (newsletters, books, etc.) published by the Society for Psychical Research, but also including many other archives that involve remote viewing research.

The term "Remote Viewing" was officially coined in the science laboratory of the American Association for Psychical Research in December 1971, during experiments with researchers Dr. Karlis Osis, Dr. Janet Lee Mitchell, Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler, and experimental subject Ingo Swann. As a summary of the term's origin and use within a scientific research context,

Ingo Swann was later to write:
"Simply in order to be able to put a category of experiments on the pages of reports which were beginning to accumulate, I suggested the term "remote sensing" or "remote viewing" -- since a distant city was, after all, remote from the experimental lab in New York. Osis and Schmeidler, however, preferred the term "remote viewing," since it was viewing which was the object of study -- such as in out-of-body viewing. So the term "remote viewing" stuck -- and was later to be added into the English language and caused to represent a somewhat confusing number of formats."
Chapter 17 Remote Viewing The Real Story

The primary written documentation of that period is by Ingo Swann.

In the mid-1970's, research projects sponsored by various organizations in the U.S. government and intelligence communities had arrived with what the Director of Research felt was sufficient evidence to go forward with to the larger scientific community. In the first major publication of parapsychological research data (and which is thought by many to be behind the acceptance of the Parapsychological Association as an affiliate of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science)], physicist Dr. Harold Puthoff (Member, IEEE) and Lockheed physicist Russell Targ (Senior Member, IEEE) published the paper A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer Over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective and Recent Research in the Proceedings of the IEEE Vol. 64 No. 3 March 1976 (they also presented at the annual IEEE convention).

The definition of remote viewing is not editable in this Wiki but should be. So I will include this research Wiki section (between the 70's and 90's if history is used as text sequence) the note that there is a great deal of debate about remote viewing's meaning as a term, in part because there are three primary things which are, depending on the context, used for definition: science protocol (which can include methodology, or not), methodological process (sometimes also called 'protocols' in and of themselves), and human psychic experience (which involves visually perceiving something which is remote, in the 'literal' definition of the term). A genuine understanding of Remote Viewing in a larger context requires at least comprehension of why there is such dispute (multiple authors in other Wikis invariably end up in editing-wars as a result of this). The most visible issues revolve around the following points:

• From its origin in a science lab the term has been afforded by many science researchers the assumption of meaning at least in part, "A free response psychic functioning experiment, referred to as Remote Viewing rather than 'ESP' by nature of its having been performed within an approved Remote Viewing science protocol." (It has been referred to as this in peer-reviewed published research papers.) Laymen are not always aware that scientific protocol in any field "evolves" as science itself learns and evolves, so what constituted an appropriate Remote Viewing protocol in 1971 is not the same as what was considered legitimate in 1981 or 1991 or presently. The science origin of the term however, resulted in most parapsychology-based scientists considering "Remote Viewing" a term that referred not just to psi but to psi-within-science.


• The term was coined, at origin, in response to experiments that focused on the psychic "projecting out of body," the primary goal of the subject (Ingo Swann) employed for the studies (and the description he uses for his personal methodology in multiple writings). This method/concept is not usually present (or certainly not required) with remote viewing research since that time. However this resulted in many laymen considering it a term that describes projecting one's awareness out of body.


• In a more casual interpretation, laymen in the media have often considered any form of "visually perceiving something non-local" to qualify for the remote-viewing term, leaving out all issues of "deliberate intention" as well as "scientific experiment." This is technically accurate if using a literal interpretation of the words, but is not what those who coined the term intended. (One might say that this would all be vastly simpler if a little more thought had gone into defining the term (or a different term) clearly at the time. In the research field, some refer to remote viewing as "Anomalous Cognition.")


• In the decade+ following the RV term's coining, thousands of people participated in remote viewing experiments around the world, using a wide variety of 'methodologies'. In the 1980's, Ingo Swann led an experiment to create "psychic methods" which might help train individuals to better (or faster) accurately perceive and communicate psi-based data. Historically, this is probably the point which later caused the most public confusion: Swann called these methods a type of remote viewing, and taught the methods to several former intelligence personnel, who post-military retirement have done extensive media-marketing and public-work during sales of the methods, which have generally been understood by the public to be sold "as" "Remote Viewing". However, that methodology is nothing like what Swann himself used when doing the initial RV work. Nor is it anything like what people around the world had used for over a decade while participating in legitimate Remote Viewing experiments and process. (Including the initial "Remote Viewers" in the U.S. Government STAR GATE program itself.) So it isn't reasonable to define it by a methodology, either. (And if it were, it would not be by Swann's later methods, but the one he used during the initial experiments.)


• The points above have led to much confusion about whether the term refers to a science protocol, a psychic experience, or a systematic "methodology" bearing the RV label.


• This has bearing on the 'meaning' provided in this original wiki entry: the remote viewing "protocol" (a set-of-rules in a science sense) exists to ensure that "no known form of information transfer could have accounted for the source of the information provided." (It could be guessing, imagination, or other things, but all of those things would be sourced from within the individual. It could NOT be physical data-transfer from another source.) Without being able to clearly "rule out" (by use of situational controls) non-psychic forms of data transfer, one can never legitimately know the data is sourced from psi. This means that performing psychic work in any methodology (even one "called" RV), and having the personal experience ("seeming to perceive something non-local"), cannot fairly be assigned the term "Remote Viewing" without the protocol which "legitimizes" the process: if performed within protocol, the result is not just imagination, fraud, accident, etc., but if accurate at above-chance/guess, is displaying some unknown 'effect' which we choose to call psi. (For lack of a better term perhaps. Dr. Ray Hyman in the 1995 AIR report agreed that there was some form of "effect" but said "he did not choose to call it psi.") It is not that a process "could not" be psychic without being performed within protocol; it is that it most certainly (at the least) is "also" something else that is not psychic, if done outside it. This has been well demonstrated for decades in science. If the data is not psychically sourced, then it certainly isn't remote viewing at all. So we come back to the issue that RV may be a psychic experience (definitely), and it may be a methodology (highly questionable, but it certainly can include this), but neither of the first two are really legitimate without the protocol (which is actually science, not psi).

The paper Replication and Meta-Analysis in Parapsychology was published by Statistician Dr. Jessica Utts in the journal Statistical Science, 1991, Vol. 6., No. 4, 363-403. In this paper outlining a meta-analysis done for parapsychology (some of the primary research reviewed was Ganzfeld Remote Viewing trials), Dr. Utts demonstrated that statistically, parapsychology not only had shown the same or better results as more and better scientific controls had been applied over time, but statistically had outperformed medical experiments, one famous example of which had been considered to have such an effect that the study was canceled out of concern for the control-group being unfairly threatened by the withholding of the medication under study.

Dr. Utts wrote:
The recent focus on meta-analysis in parapsychology has revealed that there are small but consistently nonzero effects across studies, experimenters and laboratories. The sizes of the effects in forced-choice studies appear to be comparable to those reported in some medical studies that had been heralded as breakthroughs. [...] Free-response studies show effect sizes of far greater magnitude.

One result of this publication was a noticeable shift in parapsychology science from proof-oriented studies to process-oriented studies.

The Laboratories for Fundamental Research and Cognitive Sciences Laboratory was responsible for the majority of the U.S. Government funded research done within many projects between 1970 and 1995, a number of which are now cumulatively referred to under the umbrella title "The STAR GATE Program". There were two Directors during the program's tenure: Dr. Harold Puthoff, physicist, and Dr. Edwin May, physicist. Other researchers known publicly but involved in less glorious roles or more limited terms include Dr. Keith Harary, Russell Targ, Dr. Dean Radin, and Dr. Charles Tart. Since 1995 when the official program was transferred from the DIA (to which it had been moved in 1986) to the CIA, and was then closed by the CIA a few months later, CSL has remained the most active funded research entity in the parapsychology field. Recent and current peer-review papers from CSL and its researchers can be found at the online CSL Library and the library of former CSL researcher James Spottiswoode.

The current primary research focus of the CSL is in two areas: psychophysiological measurement of precognition, which they call "Prestimulus Response", and the further statistical examination of what psychologist Robert Rosenthal (a pioneer of the use of Meta-Analysis in the field of Psychology) dubbed "The Experimenter Effect," which has had many research papers on it since the 1960's at least, including some in the parapsychology field such as by Rhea White). Research papers on the parapsychology studies which appear to relate to Rosenthal's work usually bear the acronym DAT or the term Decision Augmentation Theory.

In 1995 the U.S. "psychic program" now referred to as STAR GATE was transferred to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The CIA commissioned the American Institute for Research (AIR) to create what is now called The AIR Report, presented in the format of a presentation by Dr. Jessica Utts An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning, followed by a report by Dr. Ray Hyman Evaluation of Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena, and then a response to Dr. Hyman's report by Dr. Utts Response to Ray Hyman's Report. Directly related to this report were two other articles written by members of the STAR GATE program (these were articles "about" the report itself). One was a four-part report written by former STAR GATE member Paul Smith (Major, ret.), sections: Bologna on Wry Bread, A Second Helping, Scraps and Crumbs, Addendums and Corrections. Also, the STAR GATE Research Director at the time of the report wrote an article responding to it The AIR Review of the Department of Defense STAR GATE Program. A Commentary. (by Dr. Edwin C. May).

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Those were just the tidbits I felt oughtta be in any wiki entry for remote viewing research. - P

Remote Viewing and the Future

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 07 April 2006

Entropia sucks.

I sometimes feel as if 95% of the world around is populated with "extras," like some videogame subjective reality. Only 5% can be counted on even to show up for most of life, let alone to accomplish something once they do. Of those who show up, some only show to hang up a pedigree up like it substitutes for skill or understanding, or to nominate themselves experts and representatives of a class of people they have vastly less in common with than they imagine.

A tiny percentage of the world really seems to be living, as opposed to existing like programmed characters who fill the landscape. There is no reason I suppose that it should be any different in RVland. But I wish it were.

From late '95 when I started studying Remote Viewing, I've had certain ideas about what was possible with RV and what was possible and even probable with the Remote Viewing field. I've felt really let down, over the years, by the people I thought cared the most for RV, or knew the most about it. I blame myself... I shouldn't have built those pedestals. Still, it's been a hard road, and I've heard from a whole lot of people who've walked that same road. It shouldn't have been required, all the disillusion: Remote Viewing and its people presented properly to begin with would sure have saved a lot of time and heartache.

Over the years, I've felt so frustrated with the enormous "inertia" most of the RV field has. It's like a subconscious resistance that manifests in many ways, but at root seems to be a fundamental unwillingness to move in the direction of progress, no matter what is said on the surface. I suppose it's just an indication that on whatever level, our culture at large is just not really ready for RV yet.

I can't blame Remote Viewing as a field for suffering inertia, of course. Maybe it's just handed down by proxy. Some of the science parapsychology field I've encountered makes the mercenary tree sloths of layman's RV seem downright honest and dynamic.

One small step forward.

In March 2002, TKR officially opened its first module. It now has several, and several more coming this year. It's the most hands-on useful tool for viewer development, whether they are methods-trained, self-trained, book/video/web-trained, etc. You might think that since most folks doing training hadn't bothered to provide this kind of needed follow-up service and utilities, for nearly a decade of so many thousands of students, that once it finally came around and welcomed them and free no less, that for the sake of their students at least, they'd have at least been glad to refer folks to its existence.

Ha. You could have heard a pin drop.

Making history

History happened yesterday. And the week and year before that. It's not just what happened in 1975--1986 or even 1986-1995. To hear many people 'educate' others in RVland, you'd think all science stopped suddenly in 1986 (there are political and marketing reasons for that). To hear it go, you would still, 11 years later, think the perpetuation of Swann's first-run experiment on methods was the primary motion of value to RV. You'd think all the 'glory' of stargate, an entrepid and commendable collection of people, would have brought a little more forward to the future than the same old stories from men in suits.

It did. It brought forth Joe McMoneagle, for example. JM's now done around 100 live, in-protocol, on-camera demonstrations of remote viewing. Many on his own dime, just like the decades of doing free viewing nobody else can or will for lost children and other hard luck cases.

In March of 2002, the first "FBI: Psychic Investigator" (Chounouryoku Sousakan) show on Nippon primetime television aired, 10 of them now, plus two shows on Nippon primetime called "The Joe McMoneagle Show" (!) -- all featuring his remote viewing. They have found a LOT of people on missing-person cold-case-files now, some of them missing for over 30 years! All this from Joe's living room in Virginia. Forced into protocol: nobody, even the FBI, knows where these people are (or even if they are alive) -- that's the point.

Many people said that what remote viewing really needed was public demonstration, was in-protocol media, was "real world applications." McMoneagle has hand-delivered every one of these things to the world of remote viewing.

The viewing is amazing. The show has the hokey-hype they love there, but even the factual details are exciting as hell: these guys take info and sketches drawn by JM, and work with maps and more to figure out where on the coast to begin. Then they drive around and walk up to people saying, "Have you seen something that looks like this?" and show the sketches, until they find someone who points the way (or trip over it themselves). Some of the sessions literally have driving and walking directions and maps from the viewer/dowser, and these guys on camera are so excited, running down the street looking for the things mentioned, counting the blocks or steps or stories given, it's so very cool. The TV audience-numbers for the show are now into the stratosphere there, Joe's recognized everywhere (though fortunately, Japan has more respect and decent treatment of celebrities than most countries), and his last book sold out in Japan before they'd even had time to begin marketing for it. You'd think all that work would be the most exciting, talked about, referenced thing in the RV field online!

Hear that?

It's the sound of a pin. Dropping.

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Gosh. Maybe Joe should have attended those conferences huh?

I mean, it's not like his work is important, compared to ... compared to ... what again?

Oh yeah! There isn't really anything else in proven protocol rocking the socks off the world.

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STAR GATE is DEAD!

It's friggin dead! It is OVER, people! It's done! It's gone!

Yeah it was cool. Yeah it's important. Yeah I respect it. But I am SICK of it!

The world has been moving on for over 10 years and a good chunk of the RV field hasn't even noticed.

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There HAS been innovation in the RV field. It has been lurking in corners and closets of the offbeats and the outcasts and the independents and the rebels and the viewers whose obsession with viewing continues their momentum despite the combination of BS and posturing and marketing from and by others. It finds its way through tiny internet email groups for the most part.

The future does not belong to people who might have viewed 20 years ago. It belongs to people who view NOW. The edge of science isn't about what happened pre-1986. It's about what's happening NOW.

Tomorrow I will be nice again. Today I am ranting. C'est la vie. What are blogs for.

Building for the future

There have been a variety of proactive efforts in the RV field online over the last years. Jonina's 'University'. Glenn's big RV projects. Prudence's precog tasking approach and other novel ideas (some better than others IMO, heh). TKR's non-denominational community and RV tools. Steve's Stealth RV stuff. Marty's ARV software. Sure, any of these sources can pay money for the honor of speaking at an IRVA conference and rubbing elbows with history. That is not the same as current efforts being supported even with lip service. I recall the HI Guild used to respond with disbelief when they'd spend months working on a massive RV project and post it and hear an enchoing silence from the field, and finally quit posting them. For the most part, no matter what has been done or presented in an effort to make a name for RV today, to make an effort for the RV of today, to build something for the future, it's ignored. Viewers work their ass off to accomplish something, to be creative, to be proactive, and outside their little groups, field-wide you can hear a pin drop.

It never changes.

In the past, I have had public disagreements with several people in the field. But it has always been about specific points or behaviors, not about RV. I support the RV. I support the proactive efforts they have, no matter my argument with details, and I always support the viewers. I am beginning to wonder if calm, passive inertia -- the RV field's own brand of entropia -- is more deadly to RV than all its bad ideas and nutty people combined.

Independence Day

My priorities in remote viewing have never changed. The details of what and who I felt supported those goals certainly have. But my priority has always been what I felt was the greater good of RV, the development and continuance of the field, the opportunities and development of a sufficient number of remote viewers that we could then DO SOMETHING, damn it!

"Luck is when preparation and opportunity meet." I believe that. I believe there are many opportunities for RV even right now, particularly predictive RV. I believe there are more in the future.

I want to see viewers bloom. I want to see remote viewing as a field, for all its chaos and ego and infighting, grow like a weed. I want to see new ideas and new people and new efforts. I want to see layman's experiments because god knows if we wait for academic science to get a clue we'll all be dust before funding comes along. (And it would probably go to some bonehead when it did anyway, heh.) I want to see viewers who have the courage to try new things. The outcome is not as important as the courage to be creative, proactive, and follow something through. I want RV to live!

We have to move forward. I'm a troubleshooter and project manager by trade and by personality, and if I had time there's a lot of stuff I'd like to do in and for the RV field, but the reality is, like most everybody else, I'm just an over-busy person trying to stretch my clock. All I can do right now is view and continue to build tools that support busy adults managing to find time and resources for their own viewing, because getting a decent number of experienced, skilled viewers is the FIRST major goal: even if next year I take the trouble to try and run some private applications projects, it won't be useful if there arent' worthy viewers!

Anybody who has an idea about how I can build in new ideas to the TKR stuff, tell me, and if it's feasible (technically and time-wise), I will do my darnedest. It doesn't matter who or what the source of the idea is. What matters is that the RV field isn't exactly stuffed with people like me volunteering to build professional management software tools for RV management -- from training to applications -- so unless anybody out there is independently wealthy, I'd say for the moment, I'm what the field has got. Pity I'm not nicer, huh? So what. RV is bigger than me. Bigger than any one of us. I am able, on good days, to put my bonehead obnoxious traits aside long enough to do what serves RV. Really.

Take advantage of TKR. Make use of that resource. Make it count for something. Do you view? Do you run a group of viewers? Do you experiment? What software would make your life easy and fast so you could spend the most possible time on viewing, and the least on the bogus clerical junk that the government can afford to pay for but we can't? What would help you maintain whatever protocol you prefer with minimum effort?

If you or someone you know is doing something proactive with RV, tell me about it. I will at least post a note about it here on the blog. I'm not saying I'll be an ad board. You may suffer my presentation. But I will at least mention it and provide a link so that others in the field will know about it.

Reality.

The government isn't going to pay us. The science field isn't going to fund us. And we aren't moving forward by talking about what happened in the past.

The more innovative people are often the most controversial (or just obnoxious... a trait I know well, heh!), which has greatly contributed to resistance against new efforts, but maybe its their tendency to go their own way that is partly correlated with their actually getting something done, ya think?

Are you viewing? What do you see for the future of remote viewing as a field? What can viewers on the internet do to support each other in some way?

When can we get past the power-method competition, and if we must compete, at least move on to competing by applying real RV to real applications?

The Dark Screen and the Devil I Know

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 04 April 2006

I was looking through my overdue-for-reply email folders and thinking about the amount of time I have spent writing email on the internet since 1993 when USENET and Compuserve sucked me into The Dark Screen, as I call the addicting aspect of the internet.

It is fair to say that I could have written at least a dozen novels during this time. Got a black belt in a martial art or two. Finished my degree and got another. Or, since late 1995, done something really significant with my viewing, rather than having almost no time for it and when I did, inconsistently.

I don't think I regret it. I'm a weird combo of an introvert by deepest nature, life-trained to be an extrovert. Which means I act extroverted around people, the more people the moreso, but when left alone I lurk in solitude happily. So email has been my outlet, my inlet, and my doorway to the best friends I have ever had.

RV Online

I first met the online world with RV stuff in late '95, although most was in CompuServe then, as the www was barely existent and the average person had never heard of a search engine. As '06 wore on I did more and more online as the web grew and RV grew with it. In fact, since the StarGate program was declassified in Sep95 I can almost track the 'public growth/awareness' of RV with that of the world wide web.

By late '97 I was massively burned out on the 'online social' aspect of RV--mostly for time and politics reasons--and I officially left the field for almost four years on July 4, 1998. Yet when I returned in '02 to the field, it was as if I'd never been gone. Not a lot changed. The methods people were still battling it out, people were still fighting for recognition to use no-method or one not Swann-derived, and if it wasn't some bozo claiming to be a gov't viewer (and changing or growing stories daily) it was some bozo selling something (if not a video on how the world is ending Any Day Now™, you can buy a Psychic Sex Crystal that looks suspicious like an adults-only novelty item).

About the only diff was that CRV, in part a monster of my making on the internet I realized, had become The Establishment. Which was novel, given the massive marketing done by Dames and his legions to kill it previously. But by then I was in a different space. I'm still working off web karma to bring things into balance, despite that doesn't endear me to CRV folks who feel I betray the methods-ideals for which I used to be the poster child. On the other hand, I burned most my bridges there already anyway. C'est la vie.

The various former StarGate guys, aside from Joe who is my friend, are friendly because that is their gift as intell men and likely because I have web media in a field they're working to make a living in. We're friendly to each other. But I suspect if I were relying on them to save me from a dragon out of sheer appreciation, the lot of their love combined would likely end with me toasted by morning.

There you go. I'm the devil they know.

The Old Neighborhood

There are quite a few people that I knew online in '96 and '97 who are still in the online field. Some came in through a methods doorway and some are independents. Some were more UFOlogists with an interest in RV, and some were always sort of on the outside with RV as an interest not a pursuit. Some got sucked into one semi cult or another. For the most part though I'm glad to say that many of the folks I was around in 1997 are still around.

It feels like I've known them forever. Rich and Liz and Vance and Daz and Gene and Shelia and Dave and Glyn and Bill and I could go on with names for several paragraphs and still leave people out. Except a couple I've never met them and many I don't even email with much if at all anymore. But I've known these people for ten years! Ye gods! I accept them for what they are, whatever the areas where we diverge. I feel a bond with them difficult to explain. It's not even that all of us are friends. It's more like... they're my extended family by now.

Funny enough, a few of my un-fave folks are still around as well, and like the bonehead uncle who married into the family... they're extended family too. For me, the "RV Online" field has become almost like the old neighborhood. I suspect the stunning rate of change on the internet creates an interesting psychosocial effect similar to travel. You know those great sayings about how the person you wouldn't speak to at home is hailed as your best buddy when you're on the other side of the planet in a foreign land. There's a parallel in online RV: I've developed an almost-affection even for my seeming enemies.

You might still hold the same opinion and say so. But you lose the energy for having any real emotion behind it. It may be true that so-and-so is a jerk you've had 17 major fights with over the years and if he shows his reptilian head again you'll throw rocks at it. But it's not even really personal anymore. It's just what you do. She or he's a jerk, but he's your jerk. It's like in little ethnic neighborhoods or something. He's from the old town, and his sister married my cousin Tony and one of his kids went to college with my nephew. He may be an SOB but you know him well. Familiarity bred contempt but yet-more familiarity bred comfort. Now, he's the devil you know.

TKR is great because it mixes the old and the new, although in the Galleries (aside from the Window Gallery) it's mostly new viewers... those who don't yet have so much ego invested they're afraid to fail in front of others. I like meeting new people and there needs to be a place for new people. But sometimes it seems lonely. New folks don't have that history with me. That comfort. They're welcome-intruders in a city that is not really theirs, not in the eyes of the homeboys anyway, at least not until they've put in a significant block of history of their own, with the people, with the locale.

I don't trust them to stay around yet. To be in it for the long haul. They have yet to go through the illusions and delusions and disillusions and come out the other side still dedicated to RV even when everything in its little world seems to let you down.

Everything but what feeds you. Everything but the viewing.

Viewing...

The first and last lesson of RV online is that the only truly decent part of the field of RV is the practice of Remote Viewing. Of course, it sucks you in like The Dark Screen of the internet. Remote Viewing is The Dark Screen of the Soul. It tempts you and feeds you until you need it. 'Til you breathe it. 'Til it doesn't matter what the often bizarre details or problem people or paranormal side effects might be, because viewing is now a part of you. You need to feel that part of you, it's what makes you alive.

You know I love it. Some days I think I hate it. It delights me, infuriates me, rocks me, confuses me, drives me, frightens me, and calls me home with that deep longing only a session with my soul can quench.

For sure... it's the devil I know.

New Techs and The Same Old Story

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 03 April 2006

Bob Lazar is apparently not talking about having worked on UFOs at Area 51 anymore. His current job seems a little more down to earth.

Skye (Mistress of the Cool Offbeat) writes:

George Knapp hosted Coast last night for Art Bell. He had on Bob Lazar, who was recently raided by a whole host of government agencies. They didn't say what they were looking for and he's been unable to get the search warrant info.

Much discussion about it really centering around his new car hydrogen kits. Not only can people convert their own cars, which continue to be able to burn gasoline too, but he's also going to sell a hydrogen producing kit, which you can run on a simple rooftop sun panel.

Ya think that might be something they want to bust him for?

You can tell the next phase will be very expensive cars which run on hydrogen and you have to purchase it at hydrogen stations. It will no doubt be illegal to make it yourself.

He has also developed a material for storing hydrogen -- the tough part of the entire program -- for which he has his own particle accelerator, which is illegal for anyone to run. Who oversees any kind of radiation-generating apparatus? The FDA. (Actually the FDA oversees lasers, the NRC has to be there when he runs the accelerator, at a rather costly fee.)

http://www.switch2hydrogen.com/

OK I admit, the area where I am most cynical about the government relates to 'new technologies', particularly anything that takes money from mega-corps (including the medical industry, agri-chem, etc.). I feel that our particular breed of capitalism has created corporatism, which has all kinds of side effects, including a clear difference between the government seeming to want (let alone pursue) what is good for the nation concerning technology, resources, etc., as opposed to what is good for maintaining solid control through the same agencies-corporations that already have it. I am conservative on economics, but that doesn't mean I'm for the Evil Empires; there's a difference.

People often wonder why we don't get off our dependency on foreign oil. Think about it. The government makes zillions (I've no idea of the real number) every DAY off 'import taxes' on oil. If we drill it here or don't need it, we implode from the sudden drop in cash flow.

So they don't do jack about Bob ranting about the alien spaceship he was allegedly hired to help reverse engineer, but they give him hell about his novelty new fuel tech?!

That's interesting...

"Love" definitely has nothing to do with it

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 02 April 2006

Remember the issues surrounding the death of Kurt Cobaine. And now this. Doesn't your heart just bleed for that black widow. Not.

It's a case that doesn't even need remote viewing to figure out, since Tom Grant, a former-policeman turned P.I. has more than enough data to incriminate Love to even the dimmest jury. Alas, since the Seattle P.D. will never reconsider opening that case (and being held accountable for all kinds of copycat suicides and more), it'll never see a jury. Too bad.

It's enough to make ya hope for karmic rewards. Funny thing; once you have a target about something it seems to matter more.

Breaking News!

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 01 April 2006

So many amazing things have happened lately! Lots cooking. Do I smell a ROAST??

Psychology professor and popular anti-psi lecture-circuit speaker Ray Hyman has finally come down off that high horse which inspired his infamous quote in the AIR report, "There is an 'effect' here but I don't wish to call it psi." After years of more careful evaluation he has finally decided to call it "voodoo" and has been seen wearing a funny looking hat all over campus.

Legendary viewer Joseph McMoneagle was recently quoted by the Japanese media as admitting that he is not, actually, the greatest viewer on Earth. This sudden attack of modesty was followed by a coughing fit so severe he required medical attention. McMoneagle, a viewer-dowser and prophet, known as the most scientifically tested psychic and already a national TV star in Japan, was gesturing oddly and speaking at media cameras as the paramedics wheeled him away, but Nippon authorities refuse to confirm or deny rumors that he was yelling, "Soylent Green Is Peeeeeeoppppllllle!"

Back in the states, the IRVA's annual conference is coming up! In a daring break with tradition, IRVA leader and dynamic psi adventurer Stephan Schwartz is planning to dedicate his RV speech time to a political rally for the Right instead of the Left this year, as a gracious nod to the fact that all the STAR GATE guys were gun-toting soldier dudes and they aren't so bad really. The eminent Dr. Jessica Utts is planned to be at this conference too, with a talk entitled "Why It's OK To Hang With NewAgerbils As Long As You're Educating Them." A good lecture from her is worth the cover price. Seriously.

Remote viewing's fatherly Ingo Swann will be giving his annual IRVA public speech, "Why I Am Almost Never In Public." Similar to previous years (and again to great disappointment), Swann who is the author of some of the most amazing UFO books and claims ever, is rumored to be insisting that again, he "has no desire to talk about UFOs." Rumors also abound that the eBay market for his curious combo of 'in-demand, self-published but out-of-print' book Penetration is now providing eBay marketers an income slightly greater than Norway's GNP. Though he says there is no republishing planned for it, Swann does plan to publish another couple hundred chapters in his internet book Remote Viewing: The Real Story, which I believe should bring it up to about the year 1882.

If that isn't enough to tempt you into buying tickets, engineer Dr. Dean Radin is soon to be publishing his book on psi and physics. Radin's previous book The Conscious Universe was so inspiring that street buzz about his new book is more popular this week than even Pregnant Martians and Bush The Reptilian stories. Pre-order his book at amazon.com boys and girls (please... he still owes Dr. Dossey a bunch for that review quote!). (No but seriously -- his last book was great. I'm sure this one will be too. He'll be speaking there too.) Get tickets for the IRVA conf at rvconference.org.

Scientist Michael Persinger privately admitted to New Scientist magazine recently that a new version of his Magnetic Helmet not only caused the subject to claim he was suffering a simultaneous alien abduction, IRS auditing and the smell of peanut butter, but the subject reported that the lab's wall opened up and funky men with pins in their faces appeared. Unfortunately no follow up on this has been possible, as no members of Dr. Persinger's household or lab have been seen since.

Meanwhile over at TKR, the truly unexpected has happened: at least one "world expert at RV" has been seen doing a session provably in-protocol to demonstrate their amazing skill!

Riiiiight. Hey! Happy April Fool's Day y'all!

{Hey! This was humor, for anybody who doesn't perceive my feeble attempts above! Thanks to Rich's RV Roast and Gene's 2003 IRVA Conference Suggestions for the inspiration.}

Astral Politics

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 31 March 2006

Kind of like 'psychic' politics but specific to dreams, I guess.

Following on my syndication of the Hair-Like Wire Brain Implant dreams, I had a dream today I think is a repeat of a few lately as well but this is the first time I've gotten fully clear on it.

In the dream, there are a small group of people who are attempting to learn more about me and manipulate me. Most are men but at least one is female. A 'lead' male attempts to get my attention and present something to me, usually something kind of dumb like he is trying to distract me, like to sell me something.

While he's doing that, the other people are subtly sneaking around me, attempting to look all over and get behind me. I usually realize what the man is doing and sharply demand he move, and I move, so that I have them all in my range of sight.

Then I manage to get rid of them, all but the female who will be across the way acting as if she's uninvolved and minding her own business (but really, she is part of their team). I go over to her and I tell her look, I am more open minded and flexible than most people give me credit for; I can let more slide than most people; but I cannot and will not abide anybody being dishonest with me or attempting to control me. That will not get the result desired, I assure you of it. This approach is not the right approach to be taking with me -- at all. And she nods understanding and leaves and then I wake up.

So I'm thinking, this is such paranoia for a dream -- I am not normally paranoid in my dreams but since this series is following the weird dreams I noted a few days ago (see 03/27/06 entry), I'm wondering if it's related. What would make me paranoid? My life is fine right now. Nothing of relevence going on frankly. Some friends and family have health problems from minor to mortal or verging on it; that's a bit of a recurrence in any adult's life. Kid is ok in school, in karate. All 8 cats seem healthy and onry as ever. Husband is in a good mood with Spring and the gardening starting up again. All in all, life is just totally normal here in nowhere Oklahoma. So why the paranoid dreams?

Who knows. I mention them because I believe that recording anomalous things is good for posterity, for seeing one's own psyche curve.

And because in my opinion I am one of the few people in the remote viewing field who are (at least via internet) in a position to influence many others, and most the others in that position are Stark Raving Nuts frankly. So if I should go completely around the bend at some point, I want it documented for the good of other sane viewers what it is that took me there.

A little poem about RV hell.

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 30 March 2006

Of all the things in RV Hell
The one that I know far too well
Is when you have the chronic luck
For targets that just truly suck.

Joshua ranted of tasker dorks
After a target of "salad with fork"
And ranted in public (he really did)
After a mushroom-like white funky squid.

Can you blame him? Not for a minute.
It's not like trivia will make you learn faster.
It ain't rocket science. It's common sense isn't it??
Give me a brain and some eyes with my tasker.

We want it to matter. I want to care!
No more targets of mirrors, or air!
No more alien-sea-life-stuff.
If that limits the pool, that's just tough.

When I look at feedback and seriously now
I don't even know what it is with my EYES
Then WTF is expected and how?
If the session's confused it should be no surprise.

I'm weary of taking the time to view
(...which is hard enough to find for RV...)
To wander a session and try to relate
To something just torquing my psychology.

Royalty-free has no bearing on psi.
Trust me, stock photos need careful review.
I've nothing against some bison in field
But 14 perspectives on such? Mon dieu!

A rusting tool is an interesting target.
A closeup of 2.5 inches of it -- NOT!
It's hard enough for my brain to relate
Without adding bizarre perspectives to the lot.

Give me a target I can make a friend of.
Trivial or insipid? Don't task it! Have a heart.
I'm tired of wasting my time on the stupid.
At least most the targets make sense at TKR.

When the Whole World is a Nail

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 29 March 2006

There is the old saying about how when you give a man a hammer, the whole world becomes a nail. It's the delight of a new tool which you can apply, and seeing everything in the light of how it relates to your newest tool. Or bright idea. Or belief. Or, in the case of RV, your new data-recognition.

I've noticed it before but it came up again recently. I suspect it's the same for many viewers. You'll be going along, minding the universe's business with your viewing (I mean we can hardly say we are minding our own business can we??), and you get a relatively clear sense of a certain thing. It doesn't have to be a big, complex or complete thing. Just a thing.

Example: a sense of architecture roof/window molding/trim/frame. And say you get this fairly clear sense and it turns out you're totally right, that's not only in the session, but it's the actual target-focus. The ego, utterly DELIGHTED to feel a sense of control in a process in which it is mostly excluded-confused (when not literally beat into submission) promptly "runs with it." Hike! It has that damned football and it is not stopping until it's in the endzone.

So it becomes your hammer, your mind's new tool. And every target promptly becomes a nail. It doesn't matter what you view for a bit; you're going to see that data show up again and again for awhile. Even if your session data is totally correct; even if it's described quite differently; some part of you will be going Yep! See? There it is! The mind is so delighted with its new knowledge, and applies it like crazy every chance it gets.

This isn't limited to sessions; I think it is probably also common for viewers to notice things in the regular world much more clearly once they have really nailed them in a session.

Philosophy

When I thought about this, it started making sense, aside from just being both funny and exasperating. There are only so many physical forms in the world, shapes, relationships, geometries. There seems to be a limit to the core quantity of patterns, and just infinite variance in the detail (or, as a friend says, in the 'dimensions'). As I look around here where I'm sitting, I can 'graft on' some of the same data basics of that example data (a framing, a thick border, the outside is stronger than the inside, the inside seems to 'open up' to something else) to my printer, my monitor, my desk itself, my armchair, all the drawers next to me, the shelves, even the carpeted cat tree. The 'basic elements' that comprise the data, even in combination, are found all over the place. Between physical qualities, conceptual qualities, relationships, function, purpose, composite (materials), etc. it's just a matter of what % of a given 'thing' varies from the 'thing' in question.

I'm a musician so I think of it like chords. Say you have an A chord; you might think, "that's an A!" about many sounds, but it might actually be an augmented 7th, or a minor 3rd, or a major 4th. Often only one note has changed or simply been added, or the sequence of the notes in scale are inverted. When someone is new to the sound, they recognize the leading tones, the main effect of it. As they get more used to the detail, they begin to be able to instantly recognize the variants, and what accompanying notes (such as bass notes below the primary chords) are doing.

It is the fleshing out of an entire language. But it has to start with the building blocks of notes, which in RV I equate to entry-level (and often useless on its own, but it may be accurate) data like "slanted" and "high" and "flat" and "curved" and so on; and then into the base architecture of chords, which in RV I equate to 'things' that have multiple interrelated elements yet may still only be 'components' of other things depending on the target they're found in.

In a way I have come to see this as a good thing to recognize; when I get a data correct and then it starts showing up all over, even where it doesn't belong (--but I can see the reasons 'why' this happens in the similarities of certain points of the data), I think it's a sign that the subconscious has genuinely learned a new "composite sense".

Alrighty then! Another one down. Rinse. Repeat 20,000 times.