Remote Review

It is with extreme trepidation these days that I resort to pulling a target from the 200+ pool I created a few years back. What with TKR and the on-line RV group to which I belong (Starlight) there is generally enough for me to be getting on with.

Yet every so often something draws me back to the tousled draw full of numbered brown envelopes in my bedroom and I'll reach in for something to view. There are some interesting targets in there, if I remember rightly, an enticing blend of the esoteric and the personal. Hopefully I'll get one of those, whatever they were.

More often than not I'll pull a turkey. One of those targets set up years back before the vital importance of accurate tasking was hammered home through countless execrable cueings suffered at the hands of others. A real duffer, gauranteed to send you nowhere. Fast.

Take this morning, for instance. My co-ordinates sent me off into an odd little place to watch some guy with wild white hair loading objects into what looked like a coffin, or at least a long concave object of sorts. It seemed important to the man that this be done right. I got the impression that he was some kind of traveller, mentally if not physically...an iconoclast, even. Whatever he was doing it seemed important...if only I could make out what those objects were supposed to be, and why they were being deposited here.

My tasking cue?

DESCRIBE THE METHOD THROUGH WHICH PHYSICAL OBJECTS CAN BE TRANSPORTED THROUGH TIME.

Obviously my prior tasking self was looking for instructions for some kind of time machine, though quite how he expected to reach them through this cue alone is quite beyond me. As I sat there with my viewing sheets, my 45 minutes clearly wasted, I contemplated the possibility of transporting my own fist back through time and into the face of past-me at the time of writing that cue.

Perhaps, however, all was not in vain. Close examination of my session data reveals that I have indeed described the perfect method through which physical objects can be transported through time (as demonstrated by Dr Emmett Brown from Back to the Future, it would seem).

As a result I am experimenting by sending my guitar forward to this afternoon. I've transported it on via the downstairs cupboard, where I plan to go and check for its arrival at a little after three. Wish me luck.

It's always a joy to see a new publication on Remote Viewing. The title of Marilyn Isabelle Schmidt's recently released book suggests a somewhat more scientific treatment of the subject and lo and behold this is what we get.
        
Presented as her doctoral dissertation at California Institute for Human Science and subsequently published by Fenestra, the text is an objective trawl through thirty-odd years of Remote Viewing research interspersed with the occasional authorial aside.

Essentially Schmidt is an advocate of Remote Viewing research and a 'true believer', factors no doubt attributable to her comprehensive study of the field and somewhat limited experiences with `public domain` RV instructor Michael Eakin. At no point in her dissertation however does one get the feeling that this is a book on viewing written by a remote viewer. Instead one gets the sense of someone with an immense interest in the subject sifting several thousand pages of research papers and statistical results into a condensed, palatable log. Which is all fair and well...this is a theoretical investigation after all.
                                               

The first quarter of the book leads us through by now familiar terrain encompassing the various roles that psi has played in the development of human history. Shamanism, Swedenborg, JB Rhine etc...you get the picture. It's neatly done, though I did find myself wondering when exactly we were going to get to Remote Viewing; imagine a text on the principles of Basketball beginning with a ninety page explanation on the origins of sport itself. Still, it's nice to see the same old faces cropping up yet again as evidence for the existence of an underlying transcendental realm from which etc etc etc

From here we move rather abruptly on to a review of various research papers conducted at SRI, SAIC, within the USSR and by various other individual experimenters too numerous to mention. Essentially each review consists of the title of the investigation and a rough summary of its results. Many of these will be familiar to well-read viewers with a knowledge of the studies of Targ, Radin, Spottiswood et al, but there are reports of many more papers on a bewildering array of aspects, from Attitudes and expectancies in ESP scoring to A meta-analytic comparison of the sensitivity of direct hits and sums of ranks as outcome measures for free-response studies. Quite. This is serious stuff.

What IS refreshingly pleasant about this book is the sheer amount of RV research detailed within. Nowhere else have I seen such a huge volume of scientific research on the subject condensed into such digestible chunks. Sure I occasionally got lost amidst certain statements of statistical significance, but then 98% of all statistics bore the living pants off me. At least it's always an easy skip to the next lump of text.

What this book ISN'T is a subjective exploration of the writer's experiences with Remote Viewing. Don't come here looking for smiles...this is stern scientific appraisal from start to finish, not only of RV but of the methods by which experimental viewing is conducted. It is however one more step in the direction of a modern science that encompasses psi in an investigative capacity and as such Schmidt is to be applauded.

Am I any closer to a theoretical understanding of the processes behind Remote Viewing? Not really, no. I came to the same conclusions as Schmidt a few months ago, but these conclusions were largely arrived at by years of dedicated Remote Viewing. Science may need its peer reviews and its fuzzy sets and its research papers but we viewers largely know the arena and parameters of our viewing, what causes us to nail a target square or wonder off into the ether with a dummy in our mouth. Still, the reported results of certain studies have nevertheless set this particular viewer thinking...who'd have guessed that Vitamin A had such an effect on viewing outcome? (A qualitative appraisal of anomolous cognition following a liquidised carrot enema, Wincin, 2001.) 

As dry as they may be books like Schmidt's remain necessary bricks in the parquet floor of scientific progression and as such this reviewer believes she has done an excellent job. Like I said earlier though, you won't be digging this one out at parties...unless you're very weird indeed.