Palyne

It was a dark and stormy night.

Really. Northeastern skies were filled with electrical storm lightning, these constant flashes of diffused white intermixed with jagged sharp bolts, playing on the screen of the sky without any sound at all from that distance. It was like God’s Tesla-ball above my Sharper Image world… seen from the Wal-mart parking lot.

Maybe it was because it was so humid I was sweating three steps out of the house at nearly midnight, after carefully hiding from the outside world all day for exactly that reason. I hate being hot, and having enough thermal layering for a walrus does not help.

Maybe it was because my nearly-12 year old is starting to get more exasperating and our mutual frustration level suggests she is heading for teenager far too fast. I feel near despair sometimes at the emotional trauma of it on my end.

Maybe it was because I hadn’t had enough sleep, or was irked at myself for the growing list of things I “should” do and haven’t, or some other dissatisfied sort of reason.

But whatever the reason, I started thinking about “selfishness”; and about autonomy.

About this dilemma that most all of us have in some respect, where priorities between our eating plan and others around us, our time for various activities vs. what others want or need us to spend time doing, come into conflict.

My buddy Sara had been talking about it in her journal and I guess it just took several days to incubate in the back of my brain. My subconscious kicked it till it worked, repainted it with my own issues, and when it was presentable, dropped it into my conscious mind against a backdrop of stormy sky. So one minute I was minding my own business, and the next moment some life-sized “personal issue” was staring back at me.

I hate it when that happens. I resist evolution, dammit. Single-celled organisms are happier from what I hear, and I’m all for simplicity. But sometimes it’s like my body, mind and spirit are several meshed identities, of which my surface personality is just one. It’s like they let me be King and face for the world and feel all cocky about how I’m in charge but really, they just move on with doing whatever they feel like doing regardless of my opinions.

Such as “dealing with personal issues.” I think I’d be ok with not worrying about those until about 17 minutes before death, when I plan an accelerated chant through a rosary of apology to God and the Universe for everything I’ve screwed up in my life. I grant that doing this correctly would take vastly longer than 17 minutes, given my genuine gift for screwing up, but that’s the glory of impending doom, you see. It’ll be too late to worry about the fact that I’ll be behind schedule for yet another thing right up to the moment I keel over. As long as “Sorry I’m out of time, Lord” gets in there before the final moment, my bases are covered.

I don’t really feel like dealing with all my personal issues before then. What I’d like is for them to shut the hell up so I can get on with my life already.

But it has now come to my attention that I spend an inordinate amount of time doing completely useless things with my mind, such as:

* Feeling guilty about everything I didn’t do
* Feeling guilty about everything I’m probably not going to do
* Feeling guilty about why I’m feeling guilty rather than doing them
* Feeling guilty about what my kid wants to eat vs. what I want to eat
* Feeling –

– well you get the idea.

I realize the Virgo x4 thing is a born curse. But it’s more than that:

I’m starting to realize that a good chunk of my life that should have been devoted to my own self improvement, has instead been repressed, suppressed, marginalized, ignored, and shifted aside for things like what someone else wanted, or I thought they needed, or for what my job demanded (I felt), or what my family was pressing for, what “seemed” acceptable, what seemed like “should” be done or would be “reasonable” of me to expect of others.

It’s my life. My reality. My subjective universe. I’m supposed to be at the center of it. Yet it seems like I have spent a lot of my life almost apologizing for being at the center. And seldom doing a proper job of protecting that center.

I don’t think I’ve given myself enough space. Privacy. Autonomy. I’ve based far too much of my life, and this includes lowcarb, on what people around me wanted to eat, wanted to do, or thought I should be doing.

This manifests up-close in small ways.
* Whether I need to resist crappy food in my kitchen because someone else wants it.
* Whether I need to allow myself to be interrupted constantly, any waking (and many sleeping) moments of my life, when I’d like to be left alone to DO something.
* Whether I am truly obligated to various social obligations.
* Whether I have to sit through food that tempts me somewhere.
* Whether I have to argue with stupid people I cannot avoid who think ‘gluten intolerance’ is a food fashion statement I should get over, who think it’s nearly child abuse not to give my kid pasta, who want to lecture me on why I should be having a variety of bizarre invasive ‘tests’ just to see if I have cancer for no reason than besides they want to project it on me because I’m ‘old’ now and they assume with age comes disease.
* Whether I should be not listening to music lest it wake up someone who wants to sleep during the day.
* Whether I should be cleaning the kitchen instead of doing something I want.

The list is endless, and up close it’s trivial, but when you back off and look at the macro picture, it’s a life of self-imprisonment through “shoulds”.

Maybe some degree of really taking your life back requires “grim determination.” Not anger exactly, but a merciless recognition of the mercy you’ve never shown yourself and now actually NEED to, for your own good.

And if that’s selfish, and self-centered, then maybe it should be. Maybe any plan for true health eventually has to look past the nutrition numbers, the scale numbers, and take a hard look at the genuine personal space and autonomy and focus that a person is allowing themselves.

Maybe demanding that carby food and gluten leave my life and veggies join it, is just an analogy to demanding that people who want to project their stuff on me, or family members who want to force me to stay in the mold they’re comfortable with, deal with it. Maybe telling the world to stuff it and doing what I choose with my time no matter who it pisses off or how, is an important part of moving past the occasional blues I seem to get. Maybe more of me and less of others would be a good thing.

Have you ever noticed how people who are serious weight lifters or marathoners or musicians or whatever, seem to put their focus first, even when it drives the people around them crazy? Is it coincidence that I’m a fat woman having trouble with that? If I had more ease with that taking charge of being selfish when it’s needed for my health and sanity, would I be less like me and more like them in some way?

I had the quirky thought, “I am the cheese that stands alone.”

(Reminds me of the time I woke up from a dream where I’d been singing a song I wrote in the dream world, and had just finished singing, I am colored outside the lines…)

I am the center of the universe. Mine, anyway.

I think it’s time I started acting like it.

I knew I needed to get up and do some raking and mow part of the backyard lawn, and maybe all of the front again. It’s spring, the rain makes it grow like crazy. I was procrastinating. Just as I decided to do it, the phone rang. And a good thing I was lazy, because I wouldn’t have heard it or answered it while mowing.

I yelled to the kid and she and I ran to the car, speeding five blocks away to my parents’ house. Moments after we arrived, the local siren started screaming (signifying a twister has been seen within or from the city limits). Then we spent the next while underground, watching out the top of an open tornado shelter as clouds raced across the sky at truly incredible rates and the siren keened.

In the end, it missed us by just a few miles, literally annihilating the tiny town right next door (Picher), as part of a 1/2 mile wide, 90 mile long swath of destruction.

Which meant I didn’t get the damn lawn mowed.

Which is really pretty insignificant next to the damage, injuries and deaths all around, obviously.

It’s a little surreal when you see stuff on the national news that you just drove by on Tuesday and you realize “Hey, that small pile of boards was the school,” or, “Hey, that big block of nothingness seen from the helicopter was the housing tract where Jim lives. Er, lived.”

Rather like the winter ice storm that destroyed nearly every tree at about 18 feet and higher, making the whole town look like a war zone somehow, this has a weird psychological effect on the local onlookers. Me, at least.

***

I was browsing one of the lowcarb forums recently, and one thread was talking about things we don’t do because we’re fat. No, I don’t mean because we can’t do them, I mean because we’re embarrassed to do them — to be seen. The social horror is a more potent threat to stay inside for many than an armed curfew guard in a war zone.

Since I lost some weight, though I’m still ridiculously fat, my perception of myself has changed a little. Sure, I’m still ashamed to exist in some social respects, because having been brainwashed by the same skinny-white culturally retarded meme as the rest of North America, the reptilian part of my little tiny brain thinks that’s what I should be. I’m neither skinny (at all) nor white (much) so it’s pretty irritating that my brain got washed with that just as well as anybody else’s.

But on the whole, my willingness to be seen has increased slightly, recently. This is in part because for the first time ever, after lowcarbing and losing some weight, I:

1. Got shoes. Don’t laugh; I’d been wearing generally house slippers or thongs for years, zero foot support for a person who desperately needs it more than most, because I couldn’t find shoes I fit into. The ladies in my LC journal told me that men’s shoes have a ‘wider toe-box’ than women’s and to try that, and what do you know–I had my first pair of tennis shoes ever. Lost weight, and more weight, and now I can go to payless and slip on a pair of size 10. (I’m 8 1/2 US when normal weight.) I like the VANS-style slip-on shoes and mostly wear those. Call it stupid, but actually being able to walk comfortably has made a big difference for me.

2. Got pants. I hadn’t been able to fit in any form of pants for years, and wore skirts, usually 2-3 of them layered, instead. Skirts are no fun in wet weather, in sub-freezing weather (especially if you don’t have underwear that fit…)–I think you get the idea–or when mowing a high lawn filled with bugs… sigh. But I was able to get into a 6x, and then–less gracefully, but they stretch a bit and become loose and work fine, into a 5x–of Junonia’s “cargo pants”, which are almost, not quite, like “real” pants, something I hadn’t seen since on my hips since my early 20’s.

3. Had a day where I was unusually, deeply humiliated on the very busy street I live on. To begin with, I was already horribly embarrassed to be outside without my normal long-tent-shirt. These go from neck to knees like a giant bag preventing any onlooker from the ghastly spectre of any possible detail of my obesity. On top of that, I was trying to start a pull-cord lawnmower, which means I was also bent over with my back end sticking out and my whole body shaking wildly from the effort. I’m relatively certain it was a horrible sight to behold, and there may be passing drivers still waking up in a cold sweat from the memory. My mortification at this only added to my rage that I couldn’t get it started. But as a bizarre side effect, later on, I felt rather like I’d had the worst possible exposure issue AND SURVIVED.

And suddenly I just cared a whole lot less. I actually wore pants WITHOUT the tent-shirt to the store. And then to another store.

Nobody fainted in the produce aisle. Small children did not wail in fear. The devil-child cheerleaders of high school did not manifest like the Ghosts of my Social Outcast Past to mock me for my Levi 501’s, let alone for the current size of my butt (you never know when those cute blonde horrors are going to crop up in some public place to test your coronary health).

And after a few days I realized that instead of wearing sandles and 2 skirts, I was wearing comfortable shoes and pants. And instead of wearing sleeves and multiple layers on hot days, or skirts and sandles on snow days, I’m actually dressed sanely for the climate.

It’s really astounding how much more willing to MOVE I am, and to spontaneously do things like run out to the backyard to do a little weeding for ten minutes, or run to the store for something, or run out to the car to get the book I forgot, or grab a rake and work on the front yard while I happen to be out on the front porch anyway, when I am physically comfortable and don’t feel quite so mortified as I did before. I feel as if I am getting so much more exercise in a million small ways.

Do people still look at me with that “don’t- look- at- her- it’s- rude” evasion or the “good- god- imagine- how- many- bonbons- she- must- eat- to- be- that- fat” response? Absolutely. Do I care? Not nearly as much as I did.

You know what? I’m fat. There is no hiding it. There is no clothing, no careful posing position, no tent-like covering, that is going to fool anybody within 2 states of me into thinking I am a normal size. No matter how many layers or tents I wear, no matter how many bland and dark colors I wear, nobody is ever, not for an instant, going to NOT NOTICE that I am ABSOLUTELY HUGE.

So get the hell over it, you know? Ya don’t like it, don’t look.

While I’m not to the bathing suit in public without something over me stage yet, I am at least to the “pants and tank top while mowing on a busy street” stage. I am going out in public dressed like — I mean, acting like — I mean, ALMOST like — Gasp! –

A normal person.

***

I think I’ve lost count years ago of the things I would have liked to have done with my little girl but didn’t, because I was embarrassed; because people would look at me that way, with that revulsion, rejection, disgust, avoidance, etc.

So we didn’t go bowling, or to the pool, or any number of other things we could have done. If I couldn’t sit in the car or lurk on a bench (replete in 3 skirts and a tent…), I didn’t do it.

She’s nearly 12 now. We still have a great relationship, but she is heading into the teenage years. How much longer will my little girl trust me implicitly? How much longer will she want to go bowling with mom? She isn’t a “little” girl anymore.

Today I was thinking, and then what?

What if I’d been killed by a tornado, by anything from an act of god to an act of stupidity to a side effect of a lifetime of lousy eating? If I died tomorrow, what brave adventures would I have lived? And how would my kid remember me?

I was the person not courageous enough to do any number of things because I worried about what people would say or how they would look at me or even treat me.

I was the person who sat in too many clothes in a hot car in the sun watching while my kid swam because there was no place to sit in the pool area and I couldn’t go in.

I was the person who sat around with a computer rather than doing any number of things with the people around me I loved, because they would require being around other people I didn’t love who would look at me wrong.

You know, you, me… anyone could walk out of here and get killed by some drunk in a pickup. I could slip in the shower and break my neck. When your number’s up, it’s up.

from “The Zero Effect”

It used to be that black people had to sit at the back of the bus. But you know, severely fat people can’t even get ON the damn bus. They don’t or barely fit in the seats, they can’t or barely (sideways) fit down the aisles, and there’s not even a contingent of their own people at the back, at least, waiting to welcome them as one of them: they’re just the social pariahs of a thin-for-sex- obsessed culture, and are treated poorly by every gender, age, race, and economic class.

There is no Cheers bar “where everybody knows your name;” there’s no pub where your fellows recognize and accept you for no better reason than your stubborn nose and fiery hair prove you’re one from the clans. Just about the only place to find people likely to accept you as you are is on the internet, a virtual world apart, where people on forums gather to talk like normal people to other seemingly normal people without the horrifying social-filter that in-person relations often provide.

Bizarrely enough, in a world seriously overstuffed (no pun intended) with fat people, somehow most of us manage to be alone with it. We are outcasts in our culture and sometimes even our families, and don’t have any bonding-place for our commonality aside from online.

And today I realized:

SO WHAT.

Tina is digging through the rubble for baby clothes or anything she can salvage from the trash heap that used to be her house. One woman found two sons dead. An entire town just vanished off the map. With stuff like this going on in the world every day, going on nearly in your own neighborhood, how can obsessing on the LITTLE STUFF like how other people treat you, seem to matter in the slightest anymore?

The whole “comparative scale of what matters” suddenly seems different to me. My God. The “social rejection” of me for being fat seems so utterly absurd all the sudden.

Why does some bozo who doesn’t even KNOW me, looking at me with “that look”, matter more than me spending time doing something with my kid, for myself, whatever?

How many fat people get vastly less exercise because they’re too socially mortified to leave the house, or the environ doesn’t “fit” them to allow them basic things people need (chairs they fit in. bathrooms they can fit in. etc.), or they haven’t got the decent or comfortable clothing any smaller-sized person would to allow it?

I see people, normal sized, going out to kids baseball games. They drag out a lawn chair and they sit and drink beer and soda, use the restroom, or climb up on the bleachers. When you can’t climb, when you’re wearing skirts, when it’s freezing and you’ve only thongs or it’s wet and you’ve only slippers, when you don’t fit in a lawn chair, yet you need to sit vastly more than those people do given your size, you don’t go to those baseball games. Or you watch from the car 500 yards away. “Yeah, I saw you baby! That was great!” yeah… sure.

***

But who wants to die un-lived? Who wants to be remembered by their kids as the big fat woman who hid in the car or under neutral or dark colored tents?

Worse, who wants to regret what they didn’t do with their kids due to cowardice?

Why does being fat not only mean all the misery that comes with it physically, but such a social nightmare that we restrict our OWN lives?

Why the hell am I wearing tents? What, am I morally obligated to spare every other person the possible fright of seeing my fat jiggle?

Who needs some evil cultural conscience acting like the guard, telling you that jews negroes fat people aren’t allowed in this store or pool or bowling alley, if YOUR OWN BRAIN is acting out that damning voice?

Clarissa Pinkola Estes is a psychologist who wrote the book “Women Who Run With the Wolves.” She talked about the voices that we “internalize” until eventually we have the negative, punishing, demeaning judge and jury inside our own heads, even without our parents or schoolmates or social peers for that role. (I was surprised that I liked the book, but I did.)

People die every day all around us. Nobody knows how much life they’ve got left in this focus-reality. All we know is we are here, now. The people we love are here, now. We may not be later. They may not be later.

Maybe it’s time I quit caring so much what other people think. Maybe it’s time I did the fun things I want to do, those I can do.

It’s one thing to not be physically capable. It’s another to be a coward.

I wake up each day and say, “Thank you God, for my life.”

Maybe I should start with that, and then actually GO LIVE IT.

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 December 2007

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

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

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

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

A filter I’ve been too close to see.

An assumption I’ve been too close to question.

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

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

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

***

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

To be as spontaneous as humanly possible.

To put no judgement on the process for now.

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

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

We’ll see what happens.

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 28 February 2007

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

Some refer to it as the Big RV Closet.

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please God. Let there be viewers.

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

A couple folks had a different perspective.

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

***

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

Twelve years now.

Ever the patient,
PJ

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 21 February 2007

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intending the best! July 4, 2003.

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any time now.

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 24 May 2006

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

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

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

Just how bad is it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signs You’ve Got Remote Viewer’s Angst

Dentist appointments are a welcome break from your suffering.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You investigate your ‘gut feeling’ about RV and it only says “Go away. But first give me more chocolate.”

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

Re-gearing and Re-tooling

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

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

1. No more than one session a day.

   Desperation breeds repetition. When what we’re doing isn’t working, we tend to do the same thing harder, rather than do something differently. I am all for lots of practice but once ya slide into a miss-mode it’s different. “More sessions” in this mode end up resulting in less focus, with less emphasis on the individual session. It distributes the agony of failure. It gives the subconscious a soft landing—”I can always try again.” Demand your subconscious perform during the only chance it’s got. Pull in your focus, regroup, parse your viewing down to a few specific occasions, and give it all you’ve got. Viewing while in a funk usually just means more lousy feedback experiences to break your heart. Do just one session a day. Plan for it. Psyche yourself up for it. Feel for it. And then do it well. If it doesn’t go well, don’t go on doing session after session. Just do that one. If you fail, then suffer! On purpose. It builds character—and determination.

2. Modify session work to “exercises” with specific expectations.

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

3. Knock off the “field politics,” if you’ve got any or read any.

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

4. Re-acquaint yourself with basic RV details.

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

5. Refuse to lose — never surrender!

   I suspect sometimes that much of RV success over the long term is a matter of simply being such an unreasonable, stubborn bonehead that you refuse to lose. At least, for the really good viewers I know, this seems to be a trait they have in common! Plod on. Re-affirm to yourself that your success and development is going to happen, it is totally inevitable, you are going to be good at this no matter what, that if it isn’t working right now the subconscious is really just wasting both your time because it’s going to work, so the subconscious might as well get with the program. Refuse to accept anything else.

6. Make space and time to talk with your psychology.

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

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

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 17 May 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the Skeptic’s Dictionary places #1.

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

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

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 03 May 2006

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

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

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

Except Remote Viewing.

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

Why the heck not?

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

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

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

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

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. 19 April 2006

When I opened the TKR project, the “open and welcome to everyone” part nearly caused me physical pain. It meant I would have to be diplomatic or silent in any TKR area about anybody who had a board on the project’s forum. It meant I would be seeing my own media, my own money, my own project, used for stuff I couldn’t stand, by people I couldn’t tolerate.

I figured nobody would be dense enough to avoid free reference, links, opportunity to present their marketing. I also (boy was this idealistic!) thought nobody would be so crass as to indirectly harm their own viewers, by not at least having the same space for them in the one community-wide project everyone else had, no matter how they personally felt about anybody in it.

I figured I was doomed. It’d be my money, my time, my work, and they’d benefit, and while the “greater field of RV” and TKR itself might be a little better off for having them, on the whole, it’s more loss to an individual group to lose our link, than it is for us to lose their participation; thanks to Firedocs and the McEagle site, TKR has guaranteed incoming web traffic.

Some proved me right: In the case of PSI TECH and Jonina for example, she’s no slouch at P.R. (one of her ex-’s is actor Brad Dourif, ref: Lord of the Rings). It wouldn’t matter if I was offering an ad on my tombstone, if it was free, a useful internet link, and spelled the name right, she’d be smart enough to take it. But for the most part she was the only one; we worked hard to get most others involved even passively.

Whether because they don’t want their followers exposed to any idea outside their glory, or whether they don’t care about traffic to their website, or the media being more likely to see what they do, who knows. One thing was sure: few gave a flying pig about “supporting the larger community” by putting aside personal issues, as I and others were doing, to make one safe central ground.

But the people who could have got the most out of this, and who most made it feel like dental surgery to me to have to offer it to them, wouldn’t join! Which is really a funny irony. Those who like me the least, and could have done me the worst, didn’t. By letting their personal pique influence their professional decisions, they did me a favor of sorts, though at the expense of themselves, their viewers, and the greater RV community:

They lost out on a great opportunity for their own side, made it publicly clear they had no good concern for the field at large outside their own clique, made me look altruistic for inviting them, made themselves look retentive for refusing or ignoring, and skipped the chance to use MY money & media to make their own benefits… and make my teeth grind in the night.

Sometimes, the universe is just alright.

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 07 April 2006

Entropia sucks.

I sometimes feel as if 95% of the world around is populated with “extras,” like some videogame subjective reality. Only 5% can be counted on even to show up for most of life, let alone to accomplish something once they do. Of those who show up, some only show to hang up a pedigree up like it substitutes for skill or understanding, or to nominate themselves experts and representatives of a class of people they have vastly less in common with than they imagine.

A tiny percentage of the world really seems to be living, as opposed to existing like programmed characters who fill the landscape. There is no reason I suppose that it should be any different in RVland. But I wish it were.

From late ‘95 when I started studying Remote Viewing, I’ve had certain ideas about what was possible with RV and what was possible and even probable with the Remote Viewing field. I’ve felt really let down, over the years, by the people I thought cared the most for RV, or knew the most about it. I blame myself… I shouldn’t have built those pedestals. Still, it’s been a hard road, and I’ve heard from a whole lot of people who’ve walked that same road. It shouldn’t have been required, all the disillusion: Remote Viewing and its people presented properly to begin with would sure have saved a lot of time and heartache.

Over the years, I’ve felt so frustrated with the enormous “inertia” most of the RV field has. It’s like a subconscious resistance that manifests in many ways, but at root seems to be a fundamental unwillingness to move in the direction of progress, no matter what is said on the surface. I suppose it’s just an indication that on whatever level, our culture at large is just not really ready for RV yet.

I can’t blame Remote Viewing as a field for suffering inertia, of course. Maybe it’s just handed down by proxy. Some of the science parapsychology field I’ve encountered makes the mercenary tree sloths of layman’s RV seem downright honest and dynamic.

One small step forward.

In March 2002, TKR officially opened its first module. It now has several, and several more coming this year. It’s the most hands-on useful tool for viewer development, whether they are methods-trained, self-trained, book/video/web-trained, etc. You might think that since most folks doing training hadn’t bothered to provide this kind of needed follow-up service and utilities, for nearly a decade of so many thousands of students, that once it finally came around and welcomed them and free no less, that for the sake of their students at least, they’d have at least been glad to refer folks to its existence.

Ha. You could have heard a pin drop.

Making history

History happened yesterday. And the week and year before that. It’s not just what happened in 1975–1986 or even 1986-1995. To hear many people ‘educate’ others in RVland, you’d think all science stopped suddenly in 1986 (there are political and marketing reasons for that). To hear it go, you would still, 11 years later, think the perpetuation of Swann’s first-run experiment on methods was the primary motion of value to RV. You’d think all the ‘glory’ of stargate, an entrepid and commendable collection of people, would have brought a little more forward to the future than the same old stories from men in suits.

It did. It brought forth Joe McMoneagle, for example. JM’s now done around 100 live, in-protocol, on-camera demonstrations of remote viewing. Many on his own dime, just like the decades of doing free viewing nobody else can or will for lost children and other hard luck cases.

In March of 2002, the first “FBI: Psychic Investigator” (Chounouryoku Sousakan) show on Nippon primetime television aired, 10 of them now, plus two shows on Nippon primetime called “The Joe McMoneagle Show” (!) — all featuring his remote viewing. They have found a LOT of people on missing-person cold-case-files now, some of them missing for over 30 years! All this from Joe’s living room in Virginia. Forced into protocol: nobody, even the FBI, knows where these people are (or even if they are alive) — that’s the point.

Many people said that what remote viewing really needed was public demonstration, was in-protocol media, was “real world applications.” McMoneagle has hand-delivered every one of these things to the world of remote viewing.

The viewing is amazing. The show has the hokey-hype they love there, but even the factual details are exciting as hell: these guys take info and sketches drawn by JM, and work with maps and more to figure out where on the coast to begin. Then they drive around and walk up to people saying, “Have you seen something that looks like this?” and show the sketches, until they find someone who points the way (or trip over it themselves). Some of the sessions literally have driving and walking directions and maps from the viewer/dowser, and these guys on camera are so excited, running down the street looking for the things mentioned, counting the blocks or steps or stories given, it’s so very cool. The TV audience-numbers for the show are now into the stratosphere there, Joe’s recognized everywhere (though fortunately, Japan has more respect and decent treatment of celebrities than most countries), and his last book sold out in Japan before they’d even had time to begin marketing for it. You’d think all that work would be the most exciting, talked about, referenced thing in the RV field online!

Hear that?

It’s the sound of a pin. Dropping.

---

Gosh. Maybe Joe should have attended those conferences huh?

I mean, it’s not like his work is important, compared to … compared to … what again?

Oh yeah! There isn’t really anything else in proven protocol rocking the socks off the world.

---

STAR GATE is DEAD!

It’s friggin dead! It is OVER, people! It’s done! It’s gone!

Yeah it was cool. Yeah it’s important. Yeah I respect it. But I am SICK of it!

The world has been moving on for over 10 years and a good chunk of the RV field hasn’t even noticed.

---

There HAS been innovation in the RV field. It has been lurking in corners and closets of the offbeats and the outcasts and the independents and the rebels and the viewers whose obsession with viewing continues their momentum despite the combination of BS and posturing and marketing from and by others. It finds its way through tiny internet email groups for the most part.

The future does not belong to people who might have viewed 20 years ago. It belongs to people who view NOW. The edge of science isn’t about what happened pre-1986. It’s about what’s happening NOW.

Tomorrow I will be nice again. Today I am ranting. C’est la vie. What are blogs for.

Building for the future

There have been a variety of proactive efforts in the RV field online over the last years. Jonina’s ‘University’. Glenn’s big RV projects. Prudence’s precog tasking approach and other novel ideas (some better than others IMO, heh). TKR’s non-denominational community and RV tools. Steve’s Stealth RV stuff. Marty’s ARV software. Sure, any of these sources can pay money for the honor of speaking at an IRVA conference and rubbing elbows with history. That is not the same as current efforts being supported even with lip service. I recall the HI Guild used to respond with disbelief when they’d spend months working on a massive RV project and post it and hear an enchoing silence from the field, and finally quit posting them. For the most part, no matter what has been done or presented in an effort to make a name for RV today, to make an effort for the RV of today, to build something for the future, it’s ignored. Viewers work their ass off to accomplish something, to be creative, to be proactive, and outside their little groups, field-wide you can hear a pin drop.

It never changes.

In the past, I have had public disagreements with several people in the field. But it has always been about specific points or behaviors, not about RV. I support the RV. I support the proactive efforts they have, no matter my argument with details, and I always support the viewers. I am beginning to wonder if calm, passive inertia — the RV field’s own brand of entropia — is more deadly to RV than all its bad ideas and nutty people combined.

Independence Day

My priorities in remote viewing have never changed. The details of what and who I felt supported those goals certainly have. But my priority has always been what I felt was the greater good of RV, the development and continuance of the field, the opportunities and development of a sufficient number of remote viewers that we could then DO SOMETHING, damn it!

“Luck is when preparation and opportunity meet.” I believe that. I believe there are many opportunities for RV even right now, particularly predictive RV. I believe there are more in the future.

I want to see viewers bloom. I want to see remote viewing as a field, for all its chaos and ego and infighting, grow like a weed. I want to see new ideas and new people and new efforts. I want to see layman’s experiments because god knows if we wait for academic science to get a clue we’ll all be dust before funding comes along. (And it would probably go to some bonehead when it did anyway, heh.) I want to see viewers who have the courage to try new things. The outcome is not as important as the courage to be creative, proactive, and follow something through. I want RV to live!

We have to move forward. I’m a troubleshooter and project manager by trade and by personality, and if I had time there’s a lot of stuff I’d like to do in and for the RV field, but the reality is, like most everybody else, I’m just an over-busy person trying to stretch my clock. All I can do right now is view and continue to build tools that support busy adults managing to find time and resources for their own viewing, because getting a decent number of experienced, skilled viewers is the FIRST major goal: even if next year I take the trouble to try and run some private applications projects, it won’t be useful if there arent’ worthy viewers!

Anybody who has an idea about how I can build in new ideas to the TKR stuff, tell me, and if it’s feasible (technically and time-wise), I will do my darnedest. It doesn’t matter who or what the source of the idea is. What matters is that the RV field isn’t exactly stuffed with people like me volunteering to build professional management software tools for RV management — from training to applications — so unless anybody out there is independently wealthy, I’d say for the moment, I’m what the field has got. Pity I’m not nicer, huh? So what. RV is bigger than me. Bigger than any one of us. I am able, on good days, to put my bonehead obnoxious traits aside long enough to do what serves RV. Really.

Take advantage of TKR. Make use of that resource. Make it count for something. Do you view? Do you run a group of viewers? Do you experiment? What software would make your life easy and fast so you could spend the most possible time on viewing, and the least on the bogus clerical junk that the government can afford to pay for but we can’t? What would help you maintain whatever protocol you prefer with minimum effort?

If you or someone you know is doing something proactive with RV, tell me about it. I will at least post a note about it here on the blog. I’m not saying I’ll be an ad board. You may suffer my presentation. But I will at least mention it and provide a link so that others in the field will know about it.

Reality.

The government isn’t going to pay us. The science field isn’t going to fund us. And we aren’t moving forward by talking about what happened in the past.

The more innovative people are often the most controversial (or just obnoxious… a trait I know well, heh!), which has greatly contributed to resistance against new efforts, but maybe its their tendency to go their own way that is partly correlated with their actually getting something done, ya think?

Are you viewing? What do you see for the future of remote viewing as a field? What can viewers on the internet do to support each other in some way?

When can we get past the power-method competition, and if we must compete, at least move on to competing by applying real RV to real applications?

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 04 April 2006

I was looking through my overdue-for-reply email folders and thinking about the amount of time I have spent writing email on the internet since 1993 when USENET and Compuserve sucked me into The Dark Screen, as I call the addicting aspect of the internet.

It is fair to say that I could have written at least a dozen novels during this time. Got a black belt in a martial art or two. Finished my degree and got another. Or, since late 1995, done something really significant with my viewing, rather than having almost no time for it and when I did, inconsistently.

I don’t think I regret it. I’m a weird combo of an introvert by deepest nature, life-trained to be an extrovert. Which means I act extroverted around people, the more people the moreso, but when left alone I lurk in solitude happily. So email has been my outlet, my inlet, and my doorway to the best friends I have ever had.

RV Online

I first met the online world with RV stuff in late ‘95, although most was in CompuServe then, as the www was barely existent and the average person had never heard of a search engine. As ‘06 wore on I did more and more online as the web grew and RV grew with it. In fact, since the StarGate program was declassified in Sep95 I can almost track the ‘public growth/awareness’ of RV with that of the world wide web.

By late ‘97 I was massively burned out on the ‘online social’ aspect of RV–mostly for time and politics reasons–and I officially left the field for almost four years on July 4, 1998. Yet when I returned in ‘02 to the field, it was as if I’d never been gone. Not a lot changed. The methods people were still battling it out, people were still fighting for recognition to use no-method or one not Swann-derived, and if it wasn’t some bozo claiming to be a gov’t viewer (and changing or growing stories daily) it was some bozo selling something (if not a video on how the world is ending Any Day Now™, you can buy a Psychic Sex Crystal that looks suspicious like an adults-only novelty item).

About the only diff was that CRV, in part a monster of my making on the internet I realized, had become The Establishment. Which was novel, given the massive marketing done by Dames and his legions to kill it previously. But by then I was in a different space. I’m still working off web karma to bring things into balance, despite that doesn’t endear me to CRV folks who feel I betray the methods-ideals for which I used to be the poster child. On the other hand, I burned most my bridges there already anyway. C’est la vie.

The various former StarGate guys, aside from Joe who is my friend, are friendly because that is their gift as intell men and likely because I have web media in a field they’re working to make a living in. We’re friendly to each other. But I suspect if I were relying on them to save me from a dragon out of sheer appreciation, the lot of their love combined would likely end with me toasted by morning.

There you go. I’m the devil they know.

The Old Neighborhood

There are quite a few people that I knew online in ‘96 and ‘97 who are still in the online field. Some came in through a methods doorway and some are independents. Some were more UFOlogists with an interest in RV, and some were always sort of on the outside with RV as an interest not a pursuit. Some got sucked into one semi cult or another. For the most part though I’m glad to say that many of the folks I was around in 1997 are still around.

It feels like I’ve known them forever. Rich and Liz and Vance and Daz and Gene and Shelia and Dave and Glyn and Bill and I could go on with names for several paragraphs and still leave people out. Except a couple I’ve never met them and many I don’t even email with much if at all anymore. But I’ve known these people for ten years! Ye gods! I accept them for what they are, whatever the areas where we diverge. I feel a bond with them difficult to explain. It’s not even that all of us are friends. It’s more like… they’re my extended family by now.

Funny enough, a few of my un-fave folks are still around as well, and like the bonehead uncle who married into the family… they’re extended family too. For me, the “RV Online” field has become almost like the old neighborhood. I suspect the stunning rate of change on the internet creates an interesting psychosocial effect similar to travel. You know those great sayings about how the person you wouldn’t speak to at home is hailed as your best buddy when you’re on the other side of the planet in a foreign land. There’s a parallel in online RV: I’ve developed an almost-affection even for my seeming enemies.

You might still hold the same opinion and say so. But you lose the energy for having any real emotion behind it. It may be true that so-and-so is a jerk you’ve had 17 major fights with over the years and if he shows his reptilian head again you’ll throw rocks at it. But it’s not even really personal anymore. It’s just what you do. She or he’s a jerk, but he’s your jerk. It’s like in little ethnic neighborhoods or something. He’s from the old town, and his sister married my cousin Tony and one of his kids went to college with my nephew. He may be an SOB but you know him well. Familiarity bred contempt but yet-more familiarity bred comfort. Now, he’s the devil you know.

TKR is great because it mixes the old and the new, although in the Galleries (aside from the Window Gallery) it’s mostly new viewers… those who don’t yet have so much ego invested they’re afraid to fail in front of others. I like meeting new people and there needs to be a place for new people. But sometimes it seems lonely. New folks don’t have that history with me. That comfort. They’re welcome-intruders in a city that is not really theirs, not in the eyes of the homeboys anyway, at least not until they’ve put in a significant block of history of their own, with the people, with the locale.

I don’t trust them to stay around yet. To be in it for the long haul. They have yet to go through the illusions and delusions and disillusions and come out the other side still dedicated to RV even when everything in its little world seems to let you down.

Everything but what feeds you. Everything but the viewing.

Viewing…

The first and last lesson of RV online is that the only truly decent part of the field of RV is the practice of Remote Viewing. Of course, it sucks you in like The Dark Screen of the internet. Remote Viewing is The Dark Screen of the Soul. It tempts you and feeds you until you need it. ‘Til you breathe it. ‘Til it doesn’t matter what the often bizarre details or problem people or paranormal side effects might be, because viewing is now a part of you. You need to feel that part of you, it’s what makes you alive.

You know I love it. Some days I think I hate it. It delights me, infuriates me, rocks me, confuses me, drives me, frightens me, and calls me home with that deep longing only a session with my soul can quench.

For sure… it’s the devil I know.

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 01 April 2006

So many amazing things have happened lately! Lots cooking. Do I smell a ROAST??

Psychology professor and popular anti-psi lecture-circuit speaker Ray Hyman has finally come down off that high horse which inspired his infamous quote in the AIR report, “There is an ‘effect’ here but I don’t wish to call it psi.” After years of more careful evaluation he has finally decided to call it “voodoo” and has been seen wearing a funny looking hat all over campus.

Legendary viewer Joseph McMoneagle was recently quoted by the Japanese media as admitting that he is not, actually, the greatest viewer on Earth. This sudden attack of modesty was followed by a coughing fit so severe he required medical attention. McMoneagle, a viewer-dowser and prophet, known as the most scientifically tested psychic and already a national TV star in Japan, was gesturing oddly and speaking at media cameras as the paramedics wheeled him away, but Nippon authorities refuse to confirm or deny rumors that he was yelling, “Soylent Green Is Peeeeeeoppppllllle!”

Back in the states, the IRVA’s annual conference is coming up! In a daring break with tradition, IRVA leader and dynamic psi adventurer Stephan Schwartz is planning to dedicate his RV speech time to a political rally for the Right instead of the Left this year, as a gracious nod to the fact that all the STAR GATE guys were gun-toting soldier dudes and they aren’t so bad really. The eminent Dr. Jessica Utts is planned to be at this conference too, with a talk entitled “Why It’s OK To Hang With NewAgerbils As Long As You’re Educating Them.” A good lecture from her is worth the cover price. Seriously.

Remote viewing’s fatherly Ingo Swann will be giving his annual IRVA public speech, “Why I Am Almost Never In Public.” Similar to previous years (and again to great disappointment), Swann who is the author of some of the most amazing UFO books and claims ever, is rumored to be insisting that again, he “has no desire to talk about UFOs.” Rumors also abound that the eBay market for his curious combo of ‘in-demand, self-published but out-of-print’ book Penetration is now providing eBay marketers an income slightly greater than Norway’s GNP. Though he says there is no republishing planned for it, Swann does plan to publish another couple hundred chapters in his internet book Remote Viewing: The Real Story, which I believe should bring it up to about the year 1882.

If that isn’t enough to tempt you into buying tickets, engineer Dr. Dean Radin is soon to be publishing his book on psi and physics. Radin’s previous book The Conscious Universe was so inspiring that street buzz about his new book is more popular this week than even Pregnant Martians and Bush The Reptilian stories. Pre-order his book at amazon.com boys and girls (please… he still owes Dr. Dossey a bunch for that review quote!). (No but seriously — his last book was great. I’m sure this one will be too. He’ll be speaking there too.) Get tickets for the IRVA conf at rvconference.org.

Scientist Michael Persinger privately admitted to New Scientist magazine recently that a new version of his Magnetic Helmet not only caused the subject to claim he was suffering a simultaneous alien abduction, IRS auditing and the smell of peanut butter, but the subject reported that the lab’s wall opened up and funky men with pins in their faces appeared. Unfortunately no follow up on this has been possible, as no members of Dr. Persinger’s household or lab have been seen since.

Meanwhile over at TKR, the truly unexpected has happened: at least one “world expert at RV” has been seen doing a session provably in-protocol to demonstrate their amazing skill!

Riiiiight. Hey! Happy April Fool’s Day y’all!

{Hey! This was humor, for anybody who doesn’t perceive my feeble attempts above! Thanks to Rich’s RV Roast and Gene’s 2003 IRVA Conference Suggestions for the inspiration.}

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 05 March 2006

Oh yeah, we all know the government is supersecretly doing RV. We just can’t believe that big a group of people could be ignorant and uninterested. It could be lurking in every closet big enough for two people. In every project funded well enough for a good recliner. We’ll catch NSA and their Big RV Closet, just you wait.

For those who don’t want to wait, Remote Viewing comes up now and then in tabloid-style stories. These are usually not as well written as the tabloids at the store, and not as interesting either, but given there isn’t much media coverage of RV, we take what we can get.

The latest (thanks and hat tip to daz for this) comes from the Wayne Madsen Report, a leftist political website, for their Feb26 story about Remote Viewing.

The first part is a story I’d heard before (many times); it’s no secret RV was used, or that the Carter administration found a downed plane thanks to a psychic. The rest of it is the alleged news tidbit. To apply just a TAD bit of critical thinking here:

However, according to NSA sources, remote viewing remains an ultra secret project at the signals intelligence agency.

“Sources!” Well there’s a word that covers any imaginable thing with no evidence whatsoever. The tabloids have ’sources’ too, heh! Maybe it gets better.

According to those familiar with the program, the protocols followed have actually complied with U.S. Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18), which implements the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

True, I think… this is a trivia point anybody familiar with the old program could have mentioned. So? Putting it here is a ploy to make it sound like Ooooh Aaaaah, boy that’s really advanced, important stuff… sounds great. Has zero bearing on whether what is being claimed is true, though.

U.S. persons have been protected by the use of mandatory “two person control” (a viewer and a special handler) during remote viewing sessions,

Ha! That’s my favorite line. Protected from what? Sunburn? Aliens? Overtaxation?

carried out in a super secure chamber at NSA Headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.

For which we have, oh yeah, zero evidence, not even a convincing rumor. Couldn’t they make it convincing at least??

With recent disclosures about NSA’s violations of FISA by order of the Bush White House,

….I just knew politics were going to get in there SOMEhow…

there are concerns that NSA’s remote viewing program no longer complies with FISA or USSID 18.

This is the most common (and deft) written ploy: now we moved all the way to the “assumption” about NSA’s current remote viewing program; we’re no longer discussing it as alleged or a possibility — we’re referring to it as a total given indirectly. A lovely verbal seguey. Sheesh.

It’s not that it can’t be so — hell, I hope someone with a brain is using psi on behalf of my country! But the above article sounds like it was written for almost no other reason than to find something that MIGHT imply that Bush MIGHT be related to something which MIGHT be doing something wrong. Heh. Like we really need to stretch to find something to beat up on him about, right? Like there isn’t an endless list of great ammo right at hand.

I wish someone would make up some really GOOD lies about remote viewing. It’s kinda depressing how little interesting news there is about the topic.

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 23 February 2006

I don’t know anybody who is wholly sane. Sanity is a subjective state measured against the norm. Which is the cultural average. Except it is far more accurate to say the pervading dominant cultural influence.

In general, in most of life, “most” people seem reasonably sane. But for some reason, in any field that relates to psi, the ratio of “reasonably sane” people takes a spiral nosedive and plummets toward some single digit average.

Not like most of us don’t wonder about ourselves at times. Psi opens up a whole world of “alternative awareness.”

To be fair, I grant that it’s difficult to talk about something that our language does not have proper vocabulary for. And, it’s difficult to relate to others when our culture does not have sufficient shared-experience-set for the discussion. As for the experience, it is difficult to adapt to the constant destabilizing effects of belief systems shattered by the self-forced exposure to in-protocol RV. All viewers deal with that, often in ‘cycles’. Remote Viewing, even apart from the point of doing it, is a psychological challenge to keep up and a social challenge to communicate. I admit all of this.

I don’t want people to have the idea that psychic work makes you crazy or anything stupid like that. It’s just that there are so many totally freakin nutso people who insist on associating with remote viewing!!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaauuuuugggggh!

They are usually the people who have the most problem with feedback.

• They may insist on doing wide-scope taskings with often-iffy feedback (constantly, not just occasionally).
• They may constantly be showing everybody how astoundingly omniscient they are except, of course, they won’t do this in provable protocol (but their website can wow ya. Oh yeah dude… I really believe that…).
• They may do web searches after every session feedback, to find a sufficient amount of info that their session can then “match.”
• In more extreme cases they will just go into some la-la free-association-land and the next thing you know, their data which seems to have nothing to do with the target, they’re suggesting does relate because of {insert a 1973 Springsteen song lyric here}.

Don’t blame RV. These people were crazy long before RV ever turned their last loose screw.

Granted, even people not insane do the above. I think of them as NewAgerbils — happy little creatures who find enough joy in the Hamster Wheel of Life that “fascination” is enough… We Don’t Need No Stinking Protocol! … We Have Guru Geoff’s GRV and The Force Is WITH Us!!… they don’t drive for doubleblind, hard feedback, pushing the envelope, demanding more of themselves. Denial isn’t totally sane, but it isn’t THAT far-out-there, and most of us suffer denial in some area to some degree. It’s a matter of degree, right?

Ironically, a lot of crazy people are pretty psychic. Chronic paranoia may contribute. I think that is interwoven with part of the problem, and is one of many reasons it isn’t well addressed in our psych traditions (which means we semi-lobotomize with biochemical straightjackets like drugs, instead of seeking healing or at least adaptation).

But since some problems with need-for-control often accompany this, it’s usually 20 seconds of being really impressively psychic followed by 15 minutes of profound AOL drive. So the shorter their sessions, often the better; and for godssakes never let them near the idea of ‘analysis’, since their need to be both ‘right’ and ‘important’ usually results in something memorable. That’s where you get the highly intellectual borderlines like Ed Dames on late night radio ranting about cosmic sized paranoia (we’re ALL gonna diiiiiiieeeee!) and messianic levels of self-importance (but they, OUR SAVIOR, thanks to cosmic powers of insight they alone hold the key to, can save us all!).

Usually, unless someone is doing damage to RV or people in a big way, I don’t complain.

But damn it, is it SO MUCH TO ASK for just a FEW LESS wacko. obsessive. manipulative. borderline. psycho BONEHEADS mucking up the social spheres and public reputation of this subject?!?

Man! I TRY to be kind, patient, understanding. I really do. I have enough politics without starting new issues with new people who I don’t feel like agreeing with let alone arguing with. But some nights, I get off work, it’s a hard day, I go through stuff online if I can, and I just feel like hollering at someone,

YOU’RE A FREAKIN LUNATIC! GO THE HELL AWAY! OUT, OUT DAMNED SPOT!

There. I feel better now.