Remote Viewing

by Patrick Marsolek (8/2015)

Remote Viewing is a structured protocol for intuitive information gathering. Remote Viewing (RV) has come a long way from its beginnings in military intelligence gathering and is now being used in such diverse fields as studying viruses in microbiology, financial investing, archeology, missing persons and hostage recovery. Information gained in RV sessions is even expanding our understanding of subatomic realms. In 2012, physicists at CERN used the Large Hadron Collider to confirm the existence of the Higgs Boson particle. Later in 2012, Hitomi Akamatsu, a psychologist and student at the Hawaii Remote Viewers Guild conducted a blind remote viewing practice session of that event. Her solo session resulted in 40 pages of amazingly accurate drawings and descriptions of the facility in Switzerland, the kinds of people and the type of work being done there, the high energy event surrounding the research and previously unknown activity and characteristics of the subatomic particles.

The physicist Tomas Campbell reviewed Hitomi’s work and believed her descriptions accurately described the physical physics-research part of the facility. Campbell also suggested her description of the subatomic activity accurately represented the fundamental nature of quantum reality as we understand it. He suggested that her work showed us “how physical elementary particles, the biological (living) system, and all creation were evolved out of the same understanding of natural law based upon consciousness.” Hitomi herself wrote in her notes of the how awe-inspiring her experience was. She wrote, “Each particle seemed to be in communication with each other, even though they have a distance between them.” In her final notes, she suggests that physicists should study consciousness and the mind in order to understand the leading edge of quantum physics. (See the video: Hitomi and the God Particle)

These session results demonstrate the possibilities of RV as a research tool. It can corroborate what is already known and add previously unknown information. Pam Coronado is the current President of the International Remote Viewing Association (IRVA). in an interview with me, she said the mission of IRVA today is to help people realize that RV is something everyone can learn. Remote viewing can have real, day-to-day applications in people’s lives as well as furthering science. IRVA has members in 23 countries and serves as an umbrella organization for the different communities that are teaching RV protocols and conducting research. IRVA also supports hard science, recently awarding their Warcollier research prize to a pair of researchers using RV to better understand the Tomato Mosaic bacteriophage, which has tremendous relevance to the agricultural industry.

The term remote viewing originated in the military in the 1970‘s with the Stargate Project and was coined by the researchers Russel Targ, Harold Putoff and Ingo Swann. The goal of the Stargate Project was to determine if intuitive abilities could be taught to ordinary people and then used for military intelligence gathering.  The RV protocols were mostly “invented” by Ingo Swann, who was a natural psychic. He created the structured methodology to help individuals learn to access intuition and target it towards specific information. Within the structure, a viewer perceives information that is intuitive and couldn’t possibly be known through normal sensory channels. Studies have shown that virtually anything can be perceived, not even limited by time or space. The beauty of Swann’s approach is that it provides a structure for whatever inner experience the “viewer” has, while also keeping them focused on the goal. Within this structure, the information becomes much more accurate as was seen in the Higgs experiment.

After the Stargate Project ended in 1995 individuals from the program began teaching it to the private sector and it became known as Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV). It is the basis for the different variations that are being taught and practiced today such as: Technical Remote Viewing (TRV), Scientific Remote Viewing (SRV), Hawaii Remote Viewers’ Guild technique (HRVG) and Associative Remote Viewing (ARV).  Six of the personnel that were part of the Stargate program have formed businesses that offer RV training and consultation and there are a number of other individuals and groups that also offer a variety of services. IRVA has an extensive list of RV resources at their website: http://www.irva.org/resources/links.html.

The term remote viewing however is somewhat of a misnomer. It makes one think of remote sensing, which is use of technology to electronically view the earth with satellites. RV however takes place in a quiet room inside someone’s mind. The researcher Stephen Schwartz, who has four decades of experience with remote viewing, intuition and archaeological research, questions the name since the experience is not “remote” at all in that it is very personal to the viewer, expressing a phenomena is non-local and that it isn’t even “viewing” per se, since information can be perceived through all the senses and as direct understanding of complex phenomena, perceived by what Ingo Swann calls the bio-mind. Yet the term remote viewing has stuck and is primarily what is used in the field.

Just briefly, here’s how the structure of a CRV session works. Before the viewer even gets started, someone has created a tasking, a request for some particular information, such as activity at the time of the Higgs-Boson event. This piece of paper is put in an envelope and gets assigned a random number coordinate. Only the number is given to the viewer. Then the viewer starts working this target by writing the number and creating a spontaneous “ideogram”, a kind of squiggle on the paper. This initiates contact to the target through the subconscious. From there they go through stages which act like opening an aperture or window on the target information, starting from the most basic to more and more complex information. The first stage with the ideogrom gives the gestalt, the overall nature of the target such as living, water, structure, or event. Stage two opens basic sensory perceptions followed by the dimensional qualities of stage three which are often sketched. Stage four information becomes more complex and abstract with perceptions like “gravitational”, “biological”, or “valuable”. At stage five the viewer has fuller contact with the target and can “interrogate” for more specific information. Stage six allows for further sketching and modeling of the site while acquiring more qualitative information. For example, in Hitomi’s viewing of the Higgs particle at the beginning of this article, all of the complex information she described likely came in stages four through six of the CRV process and lasted nearly six hours.

With training, the viewer has learned to recognize the difference between perceptions and imagination. If a full-blown image of a church for example is perceived too early, the viewer might declare it as an Analytical Overly (AOL) and set it off to the side so they can continue with the process. Though this image might later be recognized as correct, early on it’s assumed to be their own imagination, the mind trying to make conclusions about the target. In order for the RV structure to work, it’s also necessary to have no frontloading, which is why the viewer is only given a random number. Even a single bit of information that is consciously known about a target will skew the results. As an average remote viewer myself, I’ve experienced how the conscious mind will latch on to any source of information that is known, making it difficult to actually perceive anything by intuitive means.

Pam Coronado, the president of IRVA is natural psychic. (image) She began her psychic career in 1996 with a dream she had of a local missing woman. She felt she had to respond to this message and reached out to local law enforcement to help solve the case.  Since then, she has worked on high profile serial murder cases and has had her own TV show “Sensing Murder” on the Investigation Discovery. Since her beginnings as an untrained natural intuitive, she has learned CRV and come to be a proponent of both natural intuitive abilities and remote viewing skills. When I asked her about the value of RV for her work, she used the example of a perceiving a church. She said, “In a typical session without training, a psychic will flash on a clear picture of a church and then it’s gone. They often will know what kind of church it is and get some details like color and the activities of the people inside. In the RV process, it takes longer to get to that kind of information, though the difference is that further into the structure it’s more of a 3-dimensional experience. You can stay there, move around, above, inside, talk to people, and get history. There’s really no limit to what  you can do.” She believes natural psychics can train themselves with RV to hone in on specific information with much more control.

A great deal of psychophysical self-regulation is needed to stay in the RV structure. Many successful remote viewers practice some form of meditative practice in addition to regular practice sessions. Then, when working a target a viewer might initiate a “cool down” period of calming the mind before starting. This is similar to a runner needing to stretch before running. Awareness of one’s own mind also helps to distinguish when one’s imagination is active versus having a spontaneous, intuitive perception, or when an emotion or shift in body energy occurs. In the RV structure there are places to put everything experienced, thus allowing the viewer stay in the process and in a clearer connection with what’s called the “signal line”, direct contact with the target. Learning remote viewing requires many practice sessions to learn the structure while getting clear feedback of the target.

Pam Coronado described to me how in her working criminal cases she often has to work directly with a detective. In working these cases she sometimes intuitively perceives “thought forms” the detective has about the case. These hypothesis might be accurate and might not be. As in the RV structure, she can differentiate thought forms from information direct from the target by “asking for divine truth.” Thus, she can set aside the thought forms and not get sidetracked by an incorrect assumption. This illustrates some of the challenges of remote viewing; information is filtered through the mind of the viewer and influenced by subtle qualities of mind that are hard to define.

Ingo Swann wrote about how expectancy and belief can affect remote viewing. To be successful, a viewer has to shift away from the beliefs of the trainers towards self-directed awareness. He described a kind of telepathic overlay whereby a viewer’s perceptions will be guided by the beliefs and expectations of the person who tasked the target, the experimenter who’s coordinating a project, or someone who’s monitoring their session. As Pam has learned to do, viewers need to learn to recognize accurate information from the actual target versus beliefs and expectations about that target. Even the thought forms that are in the collective unconscious can skew the outcome of a session.

For this reason, professionals offering RV services will often not do targets for which there is no concrete feedback. This is because there is no absolute way of ruling out telepathic overlay until clear feedback has been obtained. Thus, even though the session at the beginning of this article falls has clearly accurate readings of the physical experiment, the subatomic qualities Hitomi described are still unknown. One might question how much of Hitomi’s viewing was of the thought forms that were in the media surrounding the Higgs particle. That being said, her perceptions also confirm what many researchers do believe to be happening in the subatomic realm. Hitomi’s suggestion of a consciousness interconnecting matter is also attractive as a possible explanation for how RV itself works! Remote viewing targets with these kinds of esoteric and intangible qualities is so attractive because we want confirmation of our beliefs about them.

The Farsight Institute is one remote viewing organization that is known for tackling many of these sensational and controversial targets. They’ve published RV sessions that they claim reveal there was a civilization on mars, the location and history of the destruction of Atlantis as well as how the great pyramid was built with the influences of extra terrestrials. All of these results were from the sessions conducted by “military grade” remote viewers conducting blind sessions with no frontloading. In these sessions the viewers perceived physical characteristics that can be confirmed. Unfortunately there isn’t any way to confirm the more controversial data.

For example the Farsight Institute published a DVD entitled, “The Great Pyramid of Giza – The Mystery Solved”. This video shares the blind remote viewing sessions conducted by conducted Daz Smith and Dick Allgire, on the pyramid. In these sessions you can clearly see the accuracy of the viewers data that is verifiable, such as describing and sketching the pyramid, the size, the shape, the size of the blocks and how they were manipulated into place. The sessions go on to describe high energy cutting tools being used in the quarrying process, levitation technology being used to move them and technology that appears to have an “extraterrestrial origin”.

To me, part of the challenge in this case is that the traditional explanations for how the great pyramid was built do not adequately explain the result, especially for a several thousand year old civilization supposedly with crude tools. There is a need for some other explanation as to how the work was done. Saying that these sessions prove how they were built however seems a stretch. Are these viewers perceiving the thought forms projected by popular culture or the accurate truth? So far, one can’t clearly answer the question. At the same time, this information can be used to search out more details or direct future research. For example, if the viewers were able to pin-point a location where some remains of this advanced technology are buried, then an archaeological team could excavate that location. The concern in the RV community is that these kinds of projects with highly esoteric content diminish the validity of remote viewing in mainstream science.

At the other end of the spectrum, there’s a form of RV that uses the simplest forms of data. which is being used for financial investing. This is called Associative Remote Viewing (ARV) and it’s being used successfully for financial investing. ARV is a clever application of the RV structure which gives the result of some future binary event, such as a team winning or losing a sporting event, or a particular stock going up or down. These kinds of targets are notoriously hard to view without frontloading. So instead, a tasker associates one future outcome – win – with a physical object, such a stuffed animal, and the other outcome – lose – with a different object such as a pencil. Then the viewer is tasked to view the object that they will be shown when the outcome is known. So if the viewer describes something long, thin and hard. The tasker picks the pencil as best fitting the description and then places money on the  appropriate team for that event. There are complicating factors, but with correct attention to detail, it is accurate. Several major players in the remote viewing community have successfully invested money using ARV protocols.

If you’re still curious about RV or skeptical, learn it for yourself. As I’ve seen in trainings, there can be an amazing shift in one’s consciousness when you experience non-local perception and begin to understand that there is no limit to what you can perceive. I do believe that if we all recognized these abilities, it would change how we think about the world. As Harold Putoff, one of the original RV researchers, said, “For me, the fact of remote viewing means that the human potential is much vaster than we usually give it credit for, and this fact must be taken into account in any attempt to develop an unbiased picture of the structure of reality.” If you’re interested in reading more about the RV sessions mentioned in this article or other RV research and applications, there are two current publications: “Eight Martinis” published by Daz Smith and “Aperture” which is published by IRVA.