Instructor: Rainsong & Wayfarer
Date: March 3, 2017 (Friday)
Note: This class was conducted in the Order of the Golden Pyramid community’s chatroom
Rainsong
Alrighty then.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
Our topic for the evening is an introduction to the concepts and a *very* abbreviated history of “Remote Viewing”.
This session will not involve hands-on how-to stuff. That takes more than a single lecture of approximately an hour in textchat.
Wayfarer will be assisting me, so don’t be surprised if you see him add commentary.
Also, for the record – and because some odd rumours were circulating – I have never worked at Fort Meade. I’m not American.
Wayfarer
I’m Wayfarer also, this is a thing I’m adding here since I probably should if I’m assisting. Hello folks. I *am* American but have not worked at Fort Meade either. Since we’re being clear. 😀
tostono
Welcome.
Rainsong
As usual, I am going to start with a friendly definition: “Remote Viewing” is the use of a set of protocols within which psychic (usually clairvoyant) faculties are employed, in order to derive maximum benefit from – and as few problems from – the way the human mind processes psychic information.
That is not, by any means, a direct quote from the American literature….
In any case, simply “seeing” or sensing stuff psychically is not remote viewing. Sensing stuff within the context of one of the sets of protocols is.
Elder Takuto
I am here, thanks for doing stuff 😀
Rainsong
When the Americans started researching RV in the early 70s, it was not the first time a country’s military made use of psychic functions. It wasn’t even the first time the US did: It’s reported they had Marines using dowsing to find underground bunkers and the like in Vietnam.
RV = remote viewing (also, recreational vehicle, but I’ll only be using the first one, this evening)
When they started figuring out RV stuff, someone was sent to a location and told to look around. That person wasn’t told where he/she’d be going until the car was already underway, to avoid “cheating”
The plan was for the person doing the viewing to wait until the appointed time when the car-person would be “looking around” and report on whatever impressions s/he got from the car-person.
This was known as outbounding.
As you can imagine, this had a small disadvantage for use in psychic espionage: if the commander could get his guy or gal into the opponent’s facility/base/meeting/whatever, then there would be no need for psychic functioning
They’d just use standard HUMINT stuff.
Back to the drawing board…
Next up, they used geographical coordinates as the navigational focus.
It still worked surprisingly well, but had a problem in terms of research: it is possible for a person to have the map of the world memorized in enough detail to guess the target.
STLICTX
Well, SOME stuff like pulling up impressions from the past or telepathy could still be useful even if you could get someone physically on site.
Rainsong
Coordinates: 42°22′25″N 71°06′38″W? Hmmm. That’s in Cambridge. Harvard, maybe?
EdwardAlexander
I’ve got to run guys. Thanks for the lecture @Rainsong, I look forward to reading it later tonight
Queen HawlSera
Yo
Rainsong
Be well, EdwardAlexander
Queen HawlSera
It’s me, your bff Captain Falcon
Rainsong
(I think Wayfarer is typing)
Wayfarer
All of this I should maybe add as an aside takes place within the highly convoluted world of the military-industrial complex. Most of the research was being conducted by Stanford Research Institute while actual military applications were being done simultaneously by other parties. When you get into the world of highly compartmentalized classified projects, one hand doesn’t always scratch the other. Even if, say, CIA could get an agent on a base, they wouldn’t be inclined to tell the Army, and the Army wouldn’t be inclined to tell SRI. This kind of confusion plays a lot into why we don’t see a very clear and efficient program all the time, historically. Spy business is tricky stuff.
Rainsong
Quite so.
The researchers were a bit surprised to learn that a set of random numbers and/or letters could stand in for the geographical coordinates, if the person assigning the practice (or operational/real) target to look at just thought about the parameters of that target while writing/dictating/typing out the targeting document.
More friendly definitions: 😀
Azarea
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/stargate relevant repository, search bar is surprisingly good
Rainsong
This came to be known as Coordinate Remote Viewing, or, more commonly, CRV.
The military likes acronyms.
Thank you, Azarea. I’ll be posting “resources” later.
The person assigning the task, by the way, is helpfully called the “tasker.”
Elder Takuto
*Is silently reading along*
Wayfarer
Just another small note about *why* outbounding and use of geographical coordinates is not ideal. There are effectively two reasons, being pragmatic and operational. The first is the pragmatics that, believe it or not, not every ranking military officer immediately went “okay, psychics are a thing, neat” and threw money at the project. They needed to be able to demonstrate the effectiveness of the program in a way that didn’t look like quackery entirely. That’s the pragmatic concern. The operational concern is that if you know what you’re trying to view, you won’t view it – you’ll imagine it, or remember it, or make guesses about it. So they started using the random coordinate method both because that made Ray Hyman’s (presumably more on him later) job much harder, but also because it straight up doesn’t work well otherwise.
Rainsong
The person doing the RV assignment is called the “viewer”, usually.
And the person kinda-sorta guiding the viewer – that descriptor is not at all adequate – is called the monitor.
bluevision
The easiest format of getting into the RV state is through Ganzfeld Effect.
Wayfarer
Super-difficult to work a tasksheet in a Ganzfeld induction. I know of some research marrying the two but what is generally referred to as RV here did not usually employ a Ganzfeld or any other kind of specific trance induction method. The viewers were encouraged to develop their own methodologies for getting in the “zone” but the lab protocols more or less insisted on a room with a table, a recording device, a pad of paper, and a pen. I’m sure Rainsong will speak more about that moving forward. (RV is very specifically a set of protocols and not a ‘state’ as such, though sometimes the protocols involve ‘states’)
Rainsong
*nods* Either later in this seminar, or in a follow-up session later. Same goes for “important people in RV history you should know about.”
You might also sometimes come across something called “Technical Remote Viewing” (TRV), which was supposed to be a new-and-improved, totally-not-CRV method taught commercially. It’s CRV.
But without a monitor. So not quite CRV.
Terik
CRV-lite
Rainsong
Another variety of remote viewing is Associative Remote Viewing (ARV), which is mostly used to answer binary questions.
It’s called “associative” because two (usually two… there are some variants) targets are selected by the tasker. Most often, pictures are used for this purpose.
The tasker “associates” one of the possible answers with one picture, and the other possible answer with the other picture.
Say for example that the pictures are a cute puppy and a pile of paperclips. “Puppy” is “yes”, “paperclip” means “no”.
The viewer doesn’t know what the possible pictures are, and is tasked with “describe the picture you will be shown at (date/time)”.
You can see where this is going.
Terik: Exactly, yes.
Tasker has a question that can be answered with yes or no, in this case, but the viewer doesn’t know what the question is.
Xeraxir [Lynxion]
And what if the answer is ‘Maybe’? “I see a robot dog that pops up in MS Word to offer advice at inopportune times.”
Rainsong
Whatever picture is most like what the viewer sees is the answer the tasker goes with.
The picture the viewer is *shown* is the one associated with the answer that has been proven correct, after the fact.
If “maybe” is a possible answer, they need at least three pictures.
Wayfarer
Sometimes you Just Miss and I believe ARV deals with that by going :shrug: and putting the associative target back into the queue for a future time.
Rainsong
Or, the tasker fluffed up.
Hobbetian
Where’s the lecture, the audio? I hear nothing.
ShadowRain
Text, Hobbetian
Rainsong
*raises eyebrow* It’s a text-based lecture, as per the schedule.
Hobbetian
Ah, okay. Thanks, sorry about the confusion.
Rainsong
Wayfarer: Yep, misses happen. Nobody has a 100% accuracy rate. (Although at least one or two have claimed it.)
In all remote viewing types, “viewing” is a bit of a misnomer, for a couple reasons:
1) Data of all sensory types can be and are recorded
2) If you actually see the target in detail, the data is considered suspect….
…which brings us to AOL
AOL stands for “Analytical OverLay”
I capitalized the L because they took the third letter from the middle of the word. Seems odd to civilians. Run-of-the-mill to military and intel folks.
If any of you have ever attempted to deliberately do anything psychical, you may have noticed that the local data from around your physical body tends to be louder than the stuff you’re usually picking up psychically. There are exceptions to this, but it holds true most of the time.
Hobbetian
RV is clairvoyance under protocol, but do you think that the protocol is an important component of the capacity to RV, or a means to facilitate it?
Wayfarer
RV is the protocol itself, the whole process from target assignment from client to tasker, tasker to monitor, monitor to viewer, viewer to paper, back up the chain, through the loop, and into debrief. There is no “RV” without the protocol. That said, the protocol is designed to facilitate functioning in an environment where mistakes have consequences. It was honed specifically so that anyone could learn it, and so that it could produce consistent results consistently with, well, military precision.
In fact the program was more or less at its worst when they got away from the protocol and started letting viewers free-form it (“ERV”) using for example Tarot cards and such. Generally anyone can follow the protocol and get valid signal information if it’s done properly, there is a kind of learning curve beginning with a “beginner’s luck” and then it stops working and then you can build back up to a plateau of function, but one of the primary research objectives for SRI in the late 70s was “recruiting psychics is hard, can we train anyone to do this?”
Rainsong
*nods* This is in contrast to what countries such as the USSR were doing, i.e., recruiting people already showing skill to some degree or another. That said, at least one of the Americans was recruited into the program because his commander caught him doing PK.
Zacharias
What about AOL?
Zacharias
What is it?
Rainsong
Zacharias: I was in the middle of describing that. Planning to get back to it, once Wayfarer has finished with Hobbetian’s question
Wafarer
Yeah, they did very much select people with potential from all the different branches, and there is reason to believe they were not satisfied with the “anyone can learn it” line – anyone can learn protocol and get valid signal information, but the quality and clarity of that information does seem to be different from person to person. It’s a skill, and like any skill, some people are better than others. A well trained person will be better than a poorly trained person regardless of innate capacity, but a well trained person who is naturally talented will end up better than a person without that natural talent trained the same way. Think of it like a sport. Anyone can throw a basket with some practice, but some people will get much better with that same practice, while most will just be passable
Wafarer
And back to you. 😀
Rainsong
😀 Thanks for fielding that. (And yep, I can throw baskets, and I can throw balls, but if you want me to throw a ball into or through a basket, there’s going to be PK involved.)
Rainsong
Alright, back to AOL
Zacharias
Rainsong cheats at hoops ._.
Rainsong
Generally speaking, people’s minds like to find and identify patterns.
Rainsong
So, I show you a paper printed with a specific set of spots, most of you will actually *see* a dog, even though no animal is depicted at all.
Xeraxir [Lynxion]
If it is a skill you are utilizing it does not count as cheating.
Terik
I have skill at stacking a deck. It’s very much cheating.
Elder Takuto
I’d say using PK to help get a ball into a hoop isn’t cheating.
Using it to stack a deck is, though…
Since stacking a deck through any means is cheating
Zacharias
Sorry for that, this is a tangent…
Rainsong
In the same way, if you get an impression of “round, orange, bumpy”, your mind might supply an image of a basketball – and perhaps even an entire game – or an orange or a kumquat.
Terik
or a president
Rainsong
In any of those cases, the viewer would declare an AOL break, declare what the AOL is (i.e., “Basketball”, “kumquat”, etc), and go back to viewing.
Exactly how it’s done varies a little by protocol, but AOL is meant to be declared, so you don’t obsess on whatever pattern you detected.
If there are no AOLs declared in an RV session, the session is junk.
Suppressing AOL would completely sabotage your efforts, because those “patterns” would keep reasserting themselves, distracting you, keeping you from focusing on the actual target, and messing up your data generally. I’ll leave the long-form AOL rant for another day, however.
Terik: Yes, indeed. In my example, I was thinking of him as being the actual target.
Terik
I picked that up after I actually said it. Sadly, it made it less funny.
Rainsong
I hasten to add “target, as in what was being viewed”
Wayfarer
One of the less intuitive things for people whose exposure to this kind of thing is limited to clairvoyance or other anomalous cognition type things is that the viewer in an RV session should never be declaring that “the target is *this*” at any point, even if they are absolutely certain. It’s not the viewer’s role in the session. You definitely declare any time you think the target is *this* but it is declared as an overlay. That all gets a bit technical though.
Rainsong
Another type of overlay is Telepathic Overlay, which is telepathic interference from, usually, someone else involved in the assignment. For example, if the monitor thinks he/she knows what the target is. Or actually does know.
Wayfarer
Even at the end of the session when you’re writing up a summary, the summary is of what information you received, it’s not a description of the target site. The monitor, tasker, client, and so on determine whether or not something was a hit: the viewer is not really involved in this process. His or her involvement ends when the pen comes off the paper.
Rainsong
And this brings us to “frontloading”, another term in popular OEC parlance that is frequently misunderstood.
All it is, in a nutshell, is “information that gives the viewer something to guess from”, like those geographical coordinates I mentioned earlier.
Or, “Can someone RV my field? I think I have a parasite on it, near my elbow”
Why does this matter?
Aside from fluffing up your viewing session, because your imagination is going to take over big time,…
… it also messes up the usefulness of whatever you *do* pick up.
Another friendly – but non-political this time – example:
The tasker is pretty sure there’s a major weakness on his warthog (the plane – not animal – in this case). He wants to know where, so it can be found and fixed more quickly, easily, and cheaply.
Target is therefore: “location of structural weakness on A-10 assigned to Major Bumpkin, present time”
He assigns a number-set coordinate to it: 2435-3245
If the viewer is describing “green, soft, small, natural, fuzzy, loud, cute, intelligent, movement, bouncy, pointy, fluffy”… s/he probably missed the target, and the other data can likely be dismissed and they try again.
If the data looks more like “metal, smooth, rounded, big, man-made, mechanical”, the viewer might be looking at the right object, and further information is more likely to be usable.
Wayfarer
Could be the pilot, in the first case.
Rainsong
LOL Could be. Or it could be the pilot’s lorikeet.
Wayfarer
Not the pilot I want, but I mean that’s probably why he’s coming up as broken. :v
Rainsong
In addition to the data-dump Azarea mentioned earlier, there are some books we’d recommend, before finishing off this first section of “Introduction to Remote Viewing Concepts”:
Obviously, the CRV Manual should be read by anyone remotely interested in the topic.
Wayfarer
* One section at a time, while training with a monitor. Do not read ahead to other stages until you are proficient in the previous stages. Advancing to stage 2 without proficiency in stage 1 will hurt you.
Hobbetian
I have a question regarding coordinates
Rainsong
http://www.remoteviewed.com/crv_docs_full.pdf
Hobbetian
Inherently, would the individual at least have a sense of the geographic location
I read once that they gave the coordinates for Mars to a viewer
Rainsong
Paul Smith’s “The Essential Guide to Remote Viewing”
Hobbetian
and he described ruins and things, without being told it was Mars
Rainsong
Joe McMoneagle’s “Remote Viewing Secrets”
W Adam Mandelbaum’s “The Psychic Battlefield: A History of the Military-Occult Complex”
Wayfarer
Right, Hobbetian, that’s right. This is why geographical coordinates are no longer used. Let Rainsong wrap up the resources talk and we can talk about the Mars/Saturn/Jupiter sessions.
Rainsong
David Moorehouse’s “Psychic Warrior” (for its historical value, but not entirely for its accuracy)
Those make a good start.
Wayfarer: please do proceed with the Mars/Saturn/Jupiter sessions
Wayfarer
So there have been a few wild sessions like that. All of them obviously occurred after the transition to randomly assigned coordinate structure. Briefly, as Rainsong mentioned, the use of outbounders and then the use of geographical coordinates were both pretty short lived. SRI’s research methodology was very hit or miss early on and it’s really interesting to look at the progression on the early research. Basically, they hired some parapsychologists and, weirdly, some artists, and, well, some both, to come up with something, then they’d try it out and see what worked.
After they had things hammered out a fair bit, questions came up about what kind of targets “worked” and what kind of targets didn’t. You can assign a random alphanumeric string to anything, after all. The military folks were specifically interested in if there was a functional range, they had just done the famous submarine experiment for telepathy and they knew the Russians at the time had the edge for psyspy applications, they wanted to catch up.
The Mars session I actually think was quite late, I think that was Dames with PSI-TECH in the late 80s or early 90s.
Jupiter/Saturn were early sessions, and one of them, forgive me that I’ve forgotten which, was initially called a miss because the viewer clearly reported rings around the planet.
It was only a few months later that our first close range photos of the planet reached earth, confirming rings that we did not previously know existed. So that was a famous “welp, actually a hit,” and that session alone basically kept GRILL FLAME / STARGATE etc. in money up through SCANATE.
But the Mars session is a weird thing. Like I said, I’m pretty sure that was Dames. It *might* have been Buchanan. I haven’t looked it up. There’s a lot of controversy about it because both of them can be kind of “out there,…” Dames more so than Buchanan and Dames has a lot of baggage he brings to the field. That’s probably another discussion.
The other thing to keep in mind is that Puthoff and Swann and the early SRI guys were also weirdos in the counterculture of the time, they were basically highly academic hippies, and both Swann and Puthoff were involved in Scientology at the time, so their session directions got weird sometimes.
Rainsong
Swann did a session about Jupiter that gave data that would only be verified *decades* later.
Wayfarer
Anyways, the explanations I’ve heard on the Mars session have been, from different sources, “it was a miss,” “it was a temporal miss” (he hit the wrong time), “the target was mis-assigned,” “Dames is garbage.”
I might have time mixed up there, I think the Jupiter session is what I was thinking of and it may have been decades between, it might have been retroactively assigned as a hit in the late 80s after being run in the mid-70s.
It kept them in money for a good while though. I want to say the results came back after the PSI-TECH split though? I don’t think Stubblebine was still around.
Rainsong
I believe you’re right
Wayfarer
I can’t remember the general that replaced Stubblebine but the whole project got shoved down to contractors to protect it because the guy who took over straight up didn’t believe in psychics and felt it was a misappropriation of funding.
He also is the guy who hired Hyman to take it down first in the late 80s or early 90s. Then Hyman came back in ‘95 to help rebury it after Moorehouse went public.
Anyways the Mars session is one of those sessions that if you believe in that kind of thing you point to it to prove that there are aliens, not to prove that RV is a thing, and if you don’t believe in it you just kinda shake your head and quietly wish Dames would go away, and silently wonder to yourself if he’s not still getting paid to pretend to be crazy specifically to cut down on public interest.
Rainsong
It’s possible, that last one….
Anyway.
Questions on this evening’s session?
Hobbetian
Do you think that time of day does make a big different for someone with some experience in RV?
How much of an impact do you think sidereal time actually makes
Rainsong
The documentation I’ve seen indicates a small, possibly illusory, influence.
Not enough to concern yourself with, but enough to be aware of if you’re tracking factors such as weather, health, and so on.
Wayfarer
There is concern about solar winds and suchlike, or there was in the late 90s and early 2000s. I’m not familiar enough with the state of the art to know if solar electromagnetism has been proven to have an effect or not. I have never noticed one. I have also never noticed an effect based on time of day except inasmuch as the viewer’s own fatigue levels can be an inclemency and should be noted.
It’s my experience that early morning and late evening can be more difficult times because the wakefulness/alertness of the viewer is in transition at those times, and they may fall asleep or get distracted easier.
Rainsong
Solar winds above 430 or so are supposed to be associated with more “noise” in the signal. (I was involved in a small part of that research, and it was … fun… there was a major solar storm that summer). Conversely, high solar winds appear to be associated with “easier” results in PK
Wayfarer
Hmm. More noise to the point where there is less signal, or just more noise where the viewer’s ratios may be thrown?
Hobbetian
What do you think of the argument that Edwin May says that RV is a form of precognition
Rainsong
Wayfarer: throwing the ratios, pretty much. The data was still there
Wayfarer
I’d say that his terminology was off but then he was there when the terminology was being developed so maybe he gets a pass. RV can be used to target information ahead of time and one could make an argument that the viewer is just reporting the information that will be reported to him when the site is investigated, which I think was the idea he was playing with?
Rainsong
Hobbetian: Precog is involved in RV. And its reverse “retro-cog” looking back into time has been used for paleontology research. Whether precog is the actual mechanism? (If indeed it can be said to be a mechanism at all?) That’s above my paygrade.
The pre-cog thing is the idea behind ARV, but falls apart with things like Bevy’s work with dinosaurs
Wayfarer
Personally I adhere to a version of the informational-matrix signal theory that Swann liked, although adapted with my own thoughts and ideas. Ultimately RV is an operational system and it is fairly inadequate for addressing the greater philosophical and metaphysical questions that it brings up.
Rainsong
(That one’s a story in itself, for another day)
Hobbetian
Never heard of RV used in paleontology.
Wayfarer
I think there are probably as many different theories on how it works as there are viewers, and researchers have their own views as well.
Hobbetian
Where could I read of RV for paleontology, if you have a link at hand?
Rainsong
I don’t, sadly. What I know of that is mostly from personal conversations with Bevy when she was still alive.
Hobbetian
Ah, okay.
So do you think that someone really good at remote viewing is just naturally gifted? What kind of, or how much, experimentation should I do to see if I’m good enough to make it worth my time to spend developing? Or is that the wrong approach?
Rainsong
She did some work with dinosaurs as targets and some with “the use of this implement” from an early human settlement.
To be “really good”? Yes, that’ll be a function of natural ability. How can you determine whether you have same? Learn to RV properly, and give it serious daily practice for a year or two.
Hobbetian
Sounds good.
Wayfarer
Most people are going to hit a level of proficiency, with proper practice (which means adherence to protocol), that is well in excess of what they think is possible. It’s important to note that the military’s best and brightest had, at their peak, upper 80% on accuracy. Most people can achieve “more often than not” hit accuracy. The reason this is exceptional is because targets include “the set of all possible things,” so getting anything at all right is fairly impressive – if you’re adhering to the protocol.
The other thing I’d note is that many viewers have much easier times with certain kinds of targets and data and target phrasings and configurations and so on.
Rainsong
Yea, it’s not like playing Shapes and Colours, where it’s usually a 1-in-16 chance for a total hit.
Hobbetian
When I came into the chat, there was some discussion of ganzfeld being used, but you don’t think it’s important?
Wayfarer
I do well, for example, with geographical targets and locations, I am not as good with things like videos or photos. I am decent with “concepts” and thoughts. But I suffer with videos particularly. Why? :shrug:
Ganzfeld isn’t part of the core, fundamental protocol that most people are referring to when they talk about CRV. A CRV session involves a monitor sitting or standing behind a viewer in a moderately lit room, the viewer has a pad of paper and a pen. The viewer does whatever they do to prepare (meditates, relaxes, whatever) and when they are ready they put the pen on the paper. The monitor reads the target coordinates and it’s off to the races.
Hobbetian
I’m looking forward to really dedicating sometime to this.
Wayfarer
A viewer in a Ganzfeld effect inducing apparatus is not going to be able to write on a paper. There are other methodologies for working with a viewer in those kinds of circumstances. I’d be hesitant to call those methodologies “RV” because it’s always stressed in RV that the protocol is what’s important.
Hobbetian
Do you think that meditation is really supportive or not necessary, outside the protocol?
Wayfarer
I think it is supportive, but “necessary” is a strong word. A lot of RV training in the early stages involves learning to differentiate signal from noise. The best way, in my experience, to do this is by maintaining a kind of mindfulness or mindful awareness that meditation cultivates.
Rainsong
Joe McMoneagle thinks it’s a good idea. And my instructors “strongly advised” it.
But yea, “necessary” would overstate it.
Hobbetian
I’m going to incorporate meditation, but make RV with protocol my main focus, even over other forms of ‘magick,’ etc.
Wayfarer
It also helps to be able to leave non-session things out of session. It’s difficult not to bring our baggage from outside a session, but while stating inclemencies is meant to “call it out and let it go,” it doesn’t always accomplish that.
Very cool. You can easily incorporate meditation in just the kind of bog standard mindfulness sense, just sitting and focusing single-pointedly on an object, observing thoughts coming and going, and bringing focus back whenever you notice you’ve become distracted. The success in fact comes from noticing when your mind has wandered, the goal is not to keep your mind from wandering, that’s what minds do.
Hobbetian
Isn’t there a project for RV to invest money to validate the theory?
I remember hearing about it.
Rainsong
Greg did a series of ARV experiments with money, feeling the stock market is verifiable.
Wayfarer
I’m not sure, sounds like an ARV thing.
Rainsong
Let’s just say he didn’t need his day-job for long, after that.
Hobbetian
Greg who?
Rainsong
Kolodziejzyk
Hobbetian
Thanks.
Well, for my part, I’ve got an important and unavoidable project over the next month/month and a half.
After that, I’m going to make RV my number-1 priority and start doing it every day
Rainsong
Good stuff. It’s a useful set of skills.
http://www.remote-viewing.com/ARVpaper.pdf Re Greg’s experiment
Wayfarer
Good call. I’m sure as this lecture series progresses we’ll be discussing ways to practice if you don’t have a full operations team supporting you. The protocol was of course written for .mils and PMCs and shit to use, not for people at home. If you can put together an ops team that would probably be best, but if you can’t there are ways to get around the problem of “how do I not frontload myself when I try to view a target I want to view?”
Hobbetian
That’s true, I think if we were to establish a group that could help individuals administer the protocol, it would be helpful.
I’m up for being a part of something like that.
Since you guys have been doing remote viewing longer, has it helped develop other kinds of skills or abilities that emerged even when not under protocol?
Do you see it bleeding into your everyday activities and knowledge?
Rainsong
I have formal training in it, been involved in some research, and quite a few years of experience under my belt, but I’ve never been very good at it.
Wayfarer
I’d say there’s some overlap, yeah. I apply things I know about how RV protocols and such work to a lot of things. Understanding RV experientially can be very informative on just how information and perception works generally.
Hobbetian
Yes.
As was stated earlier, learning to distinguish between the signal and the noise, as is said as a general orientation will really help.
Wayfarer
Yeah. I mentioned that I bring my own stuff to the informational-matrix hypothesis and I do, I bring a distinctly Buddhist flavor to it, and what it means to “know,” and what information is and how that information is interacted with by sentient beings, and karma, etc, etc. So RV has given me experiences which inform my spirituality and vice versa.
I would say that it’s a worthy pursuit for any mystic, but particularly those who are looking for something concrete to point to. The magical initiate who hasn’t seen the firsthand proof, so to speak.
Hobbetian
I do appreciate the objective nature, in terms of how I can actually track my own progress.
Wayfarer
Like, you can hand-wave away any number of energetic constructs or conversations with deities or what have you, but a really good RV session leaves you going “welp, yeah, that was what that was, yup.”
tostono
The loop has a coin called “protocol coin” which… would definitely be helpful I think.
Wayfarer
And of course you’ll have Ray Hyman types coming out going, “well, statistically this that and the other and also we know psychics aren’t real so obviously this was just chance, furthermore,” but, well, you can tell. Hell, I still surprise myself with hits. I get very excited about very solid hits still. Been doing this more than half my life. Haha.
Hobbetian
Loops?
Rainsong
The Cathedral of All Saints session, even most of your AOL was accurate…
Hobbetian
Well, even Ray Hyman has taken part in studies that showed the statistically significant effect of psychic phenomenon.
tostono
(Not aiming to derail; there are manuals for the leyline loop i’m discussing in #resources)
Wayfarer
Yeah, he is not keen on admitting that, though.
Yeah, that was a recent session that was one of those ones where even I’m going “Wow, what a good hit, guess I can’t argue with that.”
Rainsong
Not to say you didn’t try to argue about it…. :/
Wayfarer
(For reference, when I am the viewer, I tend to be extremely negative towards my own results. If I alone were responsible for labeling hits, I’d probably say I’ve never hit a target.)
(This is, incidentally, why I stressed earlier that that viewer’s role ends when the pen leaves the paper and it’s not their job to assess a hit or a miss.)
Hobbetian
Will check out the leyline loop resource link.
Do you know of people still being employed in remote viewing today?
Like, say I got good at it, are their jobs available?
Rainsong
Indeed. Generally, the majority of civilian viewers are private contractors/consultants.
Wayfarer
Yes, there are several for-profit firms as well as independent contracting gigs out there. You’d probably do well to attend a course from one of the former military guys by way of credentialing, there’s a kind of soft industry standard that expects someone to have been trained formally.
But it’s not strictly speaking necessary, just a thing to put on a resume when you’re trying to impress a client.
Hobbetian
So you go to a training with a former military guy.
Rainsong
Kinda like graphic designers… major clients tend not to take you seriously without a degree and portfolio.
Hobbetian
If you show talent, it can help you get hired as a contractor?
Draco_Platina
Most of the discussion I see of RV is about pre-known targets, and later comparing the viewing data with the target and determining ‘hit or miss.’ I am curious to see more about its application where such verification is unavailable, and CRV is used *because* there’s no other way to get data.
Rainsong
Without formal certs, I’d suggest pursuing dowsing, if you want the “good” clients.
Wayfarer
Often, yeah. PSI-TECH directly hires skilled viewers off their TRV training, but I think they are all contractors now. Buchanan has a company called P>S>I that also hires students as contractors. There’s an outfit in the UK that was founded by a guy who trained under Buchanan, I think, that does it.
Hobbetian
I’m going to spend a few months learning on my own, and from there, maybe go for a formal training process as an entry.
Rainsong
Draco: for military purposes, it was not supposed to be the stand-alone data, but rather to back up another source. Using only one source of intel – psychic or otherwise – is avoided unless absolutely necessary.
Wayfarer
If I’m honest, I think a lot of the regular courses these days are strictly checkboxes: they’re usually one or two week basic courses and then they pick up people who they think can do advanced stuff, but I think for most of them it’s just a paycheck. The industry is a bit tricky that way.
Rainsong
(Granted, it can be the intel that something else is backing up, too.)
Wayfarer
Yeah, usually the procedure would be something like “we know there is such and such a cave here with such and such a layout. If you can get an RVer to look at it and they can describe those things, then we can use any additional information they might get as well.”
Draco_Platina
Ah. So primarily as an additional set of maybes for correlating maybes into probablies?
Wayfarer
They use it to get new information by using the information they had to verify that the viewer had site, then if they can confirm the viewer has site they can use any additional information that they didn’t have, passed through the filter of “is this reasonable to suspect,” then they would try to verify that as well. This is for things like planning assassinations or whatnot.
Rainsong
They’d have to invent a new rank to demote someone to, if an officer ran an op based exclusively off data they knew was only 80% accurate, best-case-scenario…much like relying on a single informant is frowned upon…. But if there’s no other choice, and the risk is deemed acceptable…
Draco_Platina
On that note, I remember reading a few times that RV was involved in a certain middle-east hostage crisis…
Rainsong
Yes, it was.
Wayfarer
Yeah, basically. That’s intel-gathering in a nutshell. NSA knows Joe Terrorist is hanging out in such and such city based on cell phone tracking, they’ve got pictures of him going into a house, they have photos of the inside of the house, throw it at the psyspies, see if they describe something that relates to something they know. If it does, you actually start running a loop on the protocol where you retarget the viewer on new aspects of the site. Eventually you may find out that Joe Terrorist is meeting a contact at that house, or is making bombs, or whatever. Or you might not. Then you go from there.
Rainsong
Notice, “they” already had a goodly amount of data, before they’d have even considered tasking the RV guys.
Wayfarer
Who was that who wrote about it? One of the former .mils wrote about it in a book. Smith maybe? Or Moorehouse? I don’t remember.
Rainsong
Probably Joe, actually, since he’s the one with the medal for it.
Wayfarer
A lot of times too it’s something like “we’re sending SEALs to hit this place either way but if the viewer says there are dangerous chemicals, or explosives, or something like that, we might take extra precautions.”
Draco_Platina
I recall seeing it anecdotally as a Big Win for RV and parapsych, making it out as if RV carried the whole op.
Wayfarer
It was one of the things that kept the project in money for sure.
Rainsong
McMoneagle’s role in the success of the op was enough for the president to award him a pretty serious medal. But his part was just one *part* of a complex operation.
Sooo, we’ve been at this for three hours now… It seems like there might be interest in continuing a series of lectures on this topic?
Mouseroot
*Caught the tail end, was pretty awesome.*
RV is definitely a good skill to have.
It seems like not only can it teach you to focus, but also connect with the world.
Wayfarer
I’m certainly happy to gab about RV stuff most of the time, so pending availability, Rainsong, I’d be glad to accompany whenever you wanted to continue. 😀
Rainsong
Thanks, Wayfarer. I’d be delighted if you’d do that. 😀
Mouseroot
I do have a question rq, though: do you think RV could be used to project or to learn to project?
Wayfarer
Unrelated, but related things. Tough question. Hm.
It’s certainly possible to learn to RV without learning to project. Like, “just project your consciousness” is not part of any protocol I know of. But projection can facilitate RV-*like* experiences, and I would imagine that the experience of viewing may make it easier to project by way of kind of tearing down mental barriers that prevent projection.
Rainsong
It may depend on where you’re starting from, too.
Wayfarer
Like, if we look at the major hurdles to projection, generally, it’s mostly our strong habituation to physical senses keeping us anchored in the body. So if a person has RV experience they will already have that experience of “oh, physical senses are more correspondent than causal, eyes are not the only source of visual information, etc.” and that could make it easier to break down those strongly held habitual tendencies.
You can also . . . Remote Influence is a thing, and that involves basically RVing “to” a place and then “doing Thing,” and that is more or less projection. Then there’s the fact that an RVer viewing a place can “echo” in that location as if they were OOBEing there sometimes, so yeah, I mean, they are – strictly speaking – unrelated but I should think a proficiency in one would help develop a proficiency in the other.
Hobbetian
I’d definitely be interested.
And, as I said, I’d be interested in starting a group that actively helped to establish and administer the protocol, so we could take turns.
Rainsong
Monitoring remotely is both not-ideal and difficult.
However, it can be done… sort of.
Mouseroot
Well, I ask because it seems like at its core you are linking to a spot, and from what I understand that’s a basic step before projecting/viewing/whatever really…so in a sense it’s just a step further, imho.
Hobbetian
Well, maybe worth playing around a bit.
Wayfarer
Like learning to play the cello wouldn’t necessarily help someone learn to play the trombone directly, but a cellist may have an easier time overall based on just knowing an instrument at all. And they would have their own unique hardships as well.
Kind of. The theory stuff is tricky. There is an “echo” at the site location but a viewer doesn’t *go* there, like there’s nothing that says “go to this place.” In Swann’s informational-matrix model basically the coordinates are tied to the place and you gain spontaneous anomalous cognition of information pertaining to that site via propagation down a signal line. You don’t ‘go there,’ you just pick up the information from the signal line, which signal line you access through the association of the coordinate set to the site, which then becomes “information about the site.” I’ve seen people associating that informational-matrix with the Theosophical society’s idea of the akashic records, which is kind of “eh” to me.
Mouseroot
Okay, I see, so there is a large difference between the two.
Wayfarer
But ultimately I just kind of . . . view. I just do the session. The nitty gritty about how it works is secondary to the case *that* it works. But yeah, like I said, they’re related but they’re not exactly related. I have also had success with clairvoyance by projecting, but that’s Extended RV at *best*, and only if you’re otherwise following a protocol of some sort.
Mouseroot
One is picking up the information, the other is actually moving a part of yourself to a location.
Wayfarer
Right. Of course, either could be doing what the other is, because the experience is kind of its own thing.
Mouseroot
Yea, but RV is actually following a protocol like stated above.
I was just curious on how similar the two was.
Wayfarer
The idea about the informational matrix and all that is really just some hypothesizing and philosophizing from one of the researchers. It seems to jive with the experiences of the people doing the thing, but it’s not gospel or anything.
Mouseroot
*Hasn’t even read it yet, I really just trust my senses, I know when I second guess or when I am imagining…not always but I am getting quite good at it.*
Rainsong
I don’t think there’s any way I could abide by any of the sets of protocols I’m aware of, while projecting. Same reason I don’t project at the computer.
Wayfarer
Yeah. In the late 80s and early 90s, after PSI-TECH formed up, the .mil people got a little weird and started doing “Extended RV” which basically was them realizing most of their talent had gone to private companies and they needed psychics, so they started getting tarot readers and other clairvoyants and so on who had their own methods. As a result they loosened up the protocol to be basically “we’re going to give you a coordinate, do your thing then write down your stuff on a paper in this format that we like.” Extended Remote Viewing is questionably remote viewing at all, in my opinion.
Rainsong
The split-awareness, bilocation partial projection thing might be possible, though.
Mouseroot
I see and I agree, the protocol is important, loosening it here and there is alright, but overall it should remain constant.
Rainsong
Scrying and tea-leaf reading are all well and good, but they are not remote viewing. As long as the practitioner knows which one s/he is doing, it’s all good.
Wayfarer
Yeah, I cast zero shade on other forms of divination and practice several myself, including just straight clairvoyant projection, but RV is the protocol thing. It’s what makes it unique. You can apply the protocol thing onto other methods but then you have to make a decision. .mil decided to call that “Extended RV” and it wasn’t really great for them, didn’t really work out.
tostono
Thank you for the great talk, Rainsong and Wayfarer.
Rainsong
Thanks for having us. It seems like there is interest in continuing with a series. Is that acceptable?
tostono
I think definitely. Also @Wayfarer you’re welcome to interview if you like at some point. Just ping @ interviewer on #casual-magick.
Hobbetian
I’m definitely interested in continuing the series.
Rainsong
I’ll relay the invitation, Tostono. He’s wondered off for the night.
Xeraxir [Lynxion]
I would definitely be interested in learning more. On a somewhat related note, how would one reduce the likelihood of temporal misses?
Seems to be a recurring issue for me.
Rainsong
As I understand it, the main way is in careful tasking. Sometimes, for example, the task leaves off the time and date entirely. It *usually* will lead to “present day/time” in such a case, but not always. For example, there’s a spot in Dallas where you’re more likely to be pulled to a shooting from decades ago.
In some cases, the monitor will direct you to move forward or backward in time.
And in some cases, the task says something like “the moment just before this picture was taken”… written on a photograph obviously.
And of course, that’s not the part you’re told. You’d be given the (usually numeric) target coordinates instead, to avoid frontloading.
One of my conspicuous misses was of “the moment just before” type: the eruption of Mt St. Helens.
One of my funniest hits was in an ARV session, which tends not to bother with quite so much detail as the other protocols, for reasons of time and because it simply isn’t needed.
The picture in question was cut from a photocopier advertisement. In it, there’s a paper coming out of the machine, with a picture of a weasel peeking out of a hollow log. In the sketch portion of the ARV bit, I sketched a long tube with something peering out one end, with five points in the positions of the ears, cheeks, and snout.
So I guess it comes back to: How are you doing your tasking?
Xeraxir [Lynxion]
Hmm…perhaps i should add “ignore all things not related to the here and now.”
Rainsong
Depending on your actual target, that might be worthwhile