Palyne

Lately I’m in the mood to wax on about this stuff so I decided I should blog on any conversation about it I had to put in writing anyway.

So regarding the part where she plucked the energy-object from you: does an archetype ever request something like this and you don’t feel comfortable giving it to them?

You mean, does an archetype ever make you feel wary and worried and unsafe? Hell yes of course, if I had a perfect relationship with them I usually wouldn’t be meditating on them in the first place. ;-) Read the rest of this entry »

I get a lot of email from the public, not much of which I have time to answer. But this one recently, I started to answer, then it became an essay, then I had to write something else as background, and finally I gave up and decided that I must really need to flesh that out, and I should blog it.

So the following post covers:

Personalization
Archetype Meditations
Hands-on Energy Healing
Energy Geometry
A little more on personalization
How to do “Reality Meds” as I called them

The email that sparked this novel:

I came across the following statement on your website: “I believe that what is inside me, is reflected outside me, and that the ‘personal relationship’ is basically the spiritual ‘technology’ of “causing change in accordance with one’s will” (creation of reality, aka ‘magick’).”

The first part I understand, because I also experience the inner and the outer as mutually reflective. But I don’t understand what is meant by “personal relationship is basically the spiritual technology of causing change in accordance with one’s will.” Would you explain what that means or point me to a resource explaining it? Read the rest of this entry »

My best friends and I wax on about RV all the time. What I’d give for a transcript, given all the things we’ve thought of spur of the moment, that fall out of my brain when I hang up the phone. One night we were talking about focus-viewing.

I often use basketball as an analogy to remote viewing. Not because it’s a good one, just because pretty much nothing is a good one so it’s not much worse than any other.

In basketball, you need a lot of practice in ‘live games’ and that’s the best thing. But really, if you want to work on layups, shooting hoops, passing, whatever, then you don’t expect a person to play five 2-hour games a week and learn everything they need from that experience. You also practice specifically your layups and passing and free throws and so forth. Because without some focused-skill in those areas, your games are going to kind of suck, and there’s too much “else” going on in games to know that you will personally get lots of practice on that one specific thing.

As a general norm, folks don’t do a lot of that in RV until they get some experience and decide they want to focus on something and make their own target pool for it and so on.

In RV a lot of it’s about learning theory and the “promptness of feedback.” Now, we never get it as rapidly as actual learning theory says matters most–that is a matter of microseconds–but it’s generally agreed that “the sooner, the better” for feedback. But you have to take into consideration that “30 seconds after session” is not nearly as ’soon’ for most the session if it was a 2 hour session, as it would have been for a 15 minute session. Read the rest of this entry »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is true based on their data.

It offends me greatly anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is there something we are missing about “intent?”

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

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

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

PJ

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

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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.)

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.

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!

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.

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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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?

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?

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

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 08 March 2006

This category should be subtitled “Incredibly long boring essays about RV.” Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Someone asked me recently:

The funny thing I noticed is that all of the tasks for the galleries state “describe the focus of the photograph”. So technically, if we are doing what we are supposed to be doing, and tasking really is as important as is generally regarded, then using the galleries should technically only make you really good at describing the focus of photographs. In other words, when you say that I should be getting more concepts and emotional information, wouldn’t those things be peripheral to the direct task? Is it possible that I only described the appearance of the castle because that was the task? Maybe the tasking is only allowing me one dimension of information. Just an idea, I am curious about whether the viewer shapes the experience or the tasker.

Since I promised myself that I would sometimes answer email via blog in order to (a) get some email answered and (b) keep the blog alive, I’ll start with this.

The funny thing I noticed is that all of the tasks for the galleries state “describe the focus of the photograph”.

Just for the record for others, “nearly” all the “practice” tasks do. With practice however, unless you’re doing it differently for some reason, usually the tasking is considered a bit “self-tasked from after-session based on feedback”. What the tasker (who is the viewer in that case) considers “part of” the target and “important or relevent” to the target, is really up to them. Other kinds of tasks (the Missions, and some of the advanced tasks) may have different instructions (given viewer) or directive (tasker ‘intent’ as recorded). However, it is a common thing that the focus of a photograph defines the “parameters” of what is included in the tasking.

should technically only make you really good at describing the focus of photographs.

The point of practice is to learn to aim as specifically as possible. The ‘given assumption’ of the target creator is that anything involved at the place/time the photo was taken, is part of the target. If there is a picture of a boat at a dock and you hear engines and seagulls, smell fresh air and feel a rocking motion, all of that is considered to be a valid part of the target; it is “implied” by feedback. Obviously a camera only gets visuals. A videocamera would also get motion and sound. You’d have to visit the site yourself to get smell or feel. But viewers get all of these things in session, even on sessions that are based on photo feedback. The ‘focus of the photo at the time the photo was taken’ is definining a space/time coordinate and everything within those — including motion, emotion, concept, and more.

concepts and emotional information, wouldn’t those things be peripheral to the direct task? Is it possible that I only described the appearance of the target because that was the task?

I would say, you describe it because you think that was the task. A tendency to highly visual data also suggests you are highly visual. That may seem obvious, but it matters because you’re the tasker. In practice where the parameter is set by feedback, the viewer is the person doing the evaluation. If the viewer sees as feedback a photo of a woman crying next a hurricane-ravaged home, and they think, “Biological. Manmade. Mess.” then their “self-tasking” is going to be different than a viewer who thinks to themselves that the most important aspect of the target is, “An event, destruction,” or, that the important aspect is, “a woman, feeling terrible grief.” Those can be three different taskings! Or one. Or…. well, it’s up to the tasker.

The point of viewing (objectively) is to get what is most important about or relevent to the target. The point of practice with specific feedback is to get as good at that “fine tuning of focus” (narrowing the aperture from ‘the universe’ to the parameters of the tasking) as possible. In the case of practice, it’s at least in part determined by what the viewer actually thinks of the target. This is why I suggest that viewers, upon feedback, sit down calmly and really study it. Feel with it, merge with it to whatever degree; go through your session and work to re-experience it and understand why each thing that came through did, or what it might mean.

Tasking Matters.

Remote Viewing has several key issues where something “can” matter and “does” matter — but does not “have” to matter.

For example, the idea that “tasking matters” is like saying that when are driving, visibility matters. Absolutely! It can matter, it does matter, it can effect results — but, that doesn’t mean that we expect every driver who encounters a little fog or rain or other “lessened or impaired visibility” to drive off the road. What we hope is that they have sufficient driving skill that they can drive at night, in fog, in rain, in snow, and not kill themselves or anybody else. Obviously, if they are on a good wide road with tilted curves on a clear day, they can really rock a racecar! That’s an ideal condition. But anybody expert at racecar driving under those perfect conditions is also expected to be at least decent at driving a subaru at night in the snow on a back road in Connecticut if needed. “It was night” is not an excuse for poor results. It is simply a statement of fact. People can excel under even poor conditions. The percentage of likelihood they will do so is probably less compared to an ideal situation. That doesn’t mean it is zero.

This is why no matter how fabulous an ice skater may be at jumps, they have to “do the 8’s” and qualify for the competition. It’s not enough to be a great jumper under perfect conditions. Basic skill across the board is considered a fundamental. After that, a specialty in some area is great. People who claim to be expert jumpers but can’t seem to get around to doing the 8’s aren’t taken seriously… for good reason.

Some will say that you should be able to sufficiently describe a computer-tasked, computer-generated photograph-feedback decently if you’re a good viewer. I agree with that. You’re basically tasking yourself after the fact on that one, since you evaluate it compared to feedback. And, despite the ability of some viewers to profoundly believe in linear time—something which I think the experience of remote viewing obliterates, and I just don’t know how they missed this effect—I don’t believe that tasking needs to come first. Just view for awhile by describing the target that WILL be tasked to you. It might be iffy at first. Stick with it and you will see: it just doesn’t matter.

Some follow on that no-tasker logic by extending it into territory where it doesn’t belong, by saying that this (viewing computer-selected targets) is so “….because tasking doesn’t matter.” Well, that’s getting carried away. Of course tasking matters. But just because it matters doesn’t mean it should make a viewer incompetent under any other condition. Like the driving analogy above, what it most means is that if you WANT ideal viewing conditions, you will arrange them.

Are ideal conditions good?

Sure!

Is this good for the viewer?

It is good for helping a viewer learn to view under ideal conditions.

Is that fairly limited scope good for the viewer?

That’s up to the viewer to decide. I think learning to ski under perfect conditions is ideal, but I wouldn’t send anybody off to a serious mountain who didn’t have experience and competence under a variety of conditions.

Some people think that only viewing under perfect conditions, with tasker and monitor and a 3 hour session twice a week, is worth doing. Maybe it is for them. It’s their viewing, it’s their life. If they have a tasker, a monitor, and three hours twice a week, and if that fulfills everything they want to do, then heck yeah, go for it! Others think that they should be able to view while waiting in line, or when they only have 6 minutes while in a rushing helicopter. If that’s their parameter for performance, that’s their choice. There’s no good or bad to it. In the end, what matters is the viewer’s development based on their own reasons for viewing. If what you’re doing is working for you, great. If it isn’t, do something else.

Maybe the tasking is only allowing me one dimension of information.

Whether the tasking allows something is a completely different story. Allows?? Flesh that out a little. Are you suggesting the words on the screen limited you? Are you suggesting the psychic intent of the tasker limited you? If so, you’d have to be assuming the tasker was (a) someone other than you, and (b) specifically excluded all information except the visual.

There is a difference between a viewer choosing to align their intent with the tasker’s, vs. the viewer being controlled by the tasker. The latter implies a level of psychic subservience that reminds me of some of Ingo Swann’s essays about this. (Somewhere I have one on that topic, I will see if I can dig it up.) I do believe that a person can “hand over their autonomy” to others if they choose. From subtle marketing to cult indoctrination, people do it all the time — consciously, subconsciously, and psychically. I believe it’s important for viewers to have the strength to be autonomous, self-determined, even boneheadedly stubborn and independent when necessary. But, that’s just my opinion.

In most situations done in a good protocol, it is critical that the viewer’s session be specifically geared to the ‘tasker’s intent’. But a good quantity of tasking provided viewers, particularly by those who are not experienced viewers themselves or in ’social’ viewing, is lousy tasking. If a viewer cannot psychically and psychologically “bring the point of control into themselves” for this process, they will be subject to every smallest screwup a tasker can make, and the list is infinite. Is the tasker’s intent what they wrote down as their intent? Or have they subconcious (or conscious) intentions aside from what is ‘on paper’? “Which” intent is the viewer viewing? What if the intents conscious vs. subconscious vs. written are contradictory in some fashion? How much detail does the intent include? If the target is the town square at 9pm next Tuesday, does the tasker really want to know the environment there at that time? Would they be interested to know that at 9:17pm a bomb goes off? Interested, or actually looking for something like that? If the latter, are they even tasking that correctly?

(Target definition is an art as well as a science, and I personally suspect that we could trace more of remote viewing to that subject than to anything else outside of the viewer’s psychology.)

For any viewing which feedback is eventually available (and eventually may mean ‘25 years’), it may very well be up to viewer to determine what was most appropriate data for the occasion. The viewer makes that decision assumedly psychically, although they consciously evaluate what they can (the conscious part is after the fact, though). In an idealized world, the viewer makes it in psychic tandem with the tasker and both are in tandem with the purpose and outcome of the viewing. It is not always an idealized world though.

At some point, when the tasking is unknown (e.g., the viewer has no directions but is only told ‘describe the target’ or given numbers or what have you), it is going to come down to who is to be master of the decision. About the task, the details, the ‘truth’. The tasker, or the viewer? What if there is no tasker? What if the tasker is wrong, has conflicting intentions, etc.? Do you train a viewer to rely utterly on the tasker, and devote most of your time to training taskers not to screw up? Or do you train a viewer to rely on psi, and devote most of your time to training viewers how to remote view “what matters”?

I am curious about whether the viewer shapes the experience or the tasker.

Who makes that decision? Who can make it, except the viewer?

The reality of psi is that you do astoundingly well because you want to, you allow yourself to, you make it happen, and you more and more come to accept that it can and it WILL.

That is no different for describing a stone structure than a person’s feelings or a temporal series of events.