This originally posted as four posts between March 26 and 29, 2007. Reposted here as one post for your convenience.
An examination in four parts
The best way that I can think of to give you the flavor of the process of remote viewing is to examine in detail the remote viewing exercise I engaged in on Wednesday, March 21, 2007. (At other times in the day I served as monitor or as one of the panel of judges, as we all did.)
The remote viewing session involved doing the viewing, with the assistance of a monitor, and then being judged by a panel of eight judges who had to decide which of four possible targets in front of them was the one I had attempted to remote view. I propose to examine it in four pieces:
This first entry talks about the process as I experienced it.
The next will consist of my notes, sketches, and summary produced during and after my viewing. (However, this entry will have to wait until I figure out how to upload scans of my notes! It could be years!)
A third entry will consist of the target pool — the four photos before the judges – to give you an opportunity to examine the photos in light of my sketches and commentary, and see if you could have picked out my target. (This, too, will depend upon my being able to figure out how to upload images.)
Finally — assuming I do figure out how to upload images — a fourth entry will display the target, and will discuss why the judges were able to identify it as the target.
Part one. The process.
Skip Atwater had described for us the various styles of remote viewing, and had suggested that we pick the one we were most comfortable with, or pick bits and pieces of various systems if we so wished. I was interested in controlled remote viewing (CRV) but knew I was not ready to attempt it. It required too much structure and I didn’t feel I had time enough to absorb what was necessary. One experiment at a time! So what I did might be described as extended remote viewing or ERV.
Nancy, my monitor, was quite well-versed in CRV and not at all comfortable with ERV, so it is striking that her presence was helpful even though she herself didn’t think so. She and I found a table in one corner of the dining room, because I prefer to work sitting up rather than lying down. Sitting there with some blank sheets of paper and a pencil, I went within and tried to perceive without adding analytical overly. If you think that’s easy, try it. In the absence of sensory data, you must attempt to catch the fleeting impression on the wing without at the same time accepting as perception any image that may flit through your mind.
Having in mind what Skip had told us (“describe, don’t name”) I repeatedly sketched whatever came to mind, resisting the impulse to turn the sketches into complete pictures. Thus I had a series of fragmentary impressions and tried my best to leave them as fragmentary impressions rather than create story around them. Of course in this I was only partly successful. The drive to create story is very strong.
As I worked Nancy repeatedly reminded me to return to the target, so that I resisted drifting too far away from perception. By the fourth page of notes, I was pretty sure what I was looking at, and rather than fragments I was putting together a coherent picture. Then in accordance with our instructions, I wrote a summary of what I felt I had perceived. This summary included quite a bit of detail, which as it turned out was just as well. By the end of the summary I suddenly had a suspicion that I knew what the target was. Despite Nancy’s reservations, I wrote down the name, although with a saving question mark.
At that point, she gathered the materials and handed them in to Skip, to give to the judges, and we began to wait. (And wait. And wait.) Others had finished before we had, and so it was a while before the judges even got to us. On the one hand it was nice to have down time, and on the other hand there was a certain impatience to know the result.
When Skip did finally bring us the results, he said, “Now before you open the envelope, I want to explain a couple things so that you won’t be too disappointed.” Knowing Skip as well as I do, I should have smelled a rat, but I didn’t. He got me. I had a first-place match. And, he said, the judges had not had a very hard time deciding.
But that isn’t the same thing as saying that I knew what I was perceiving – as we shall see.
Part 2. My notes and sketches
I see that the scanned pages didn’t display. I will try to fix that and post them separately, as these notes won’t mean much if you can’t see the sketches. But I’ll leave this as it is and if I can get the pages uploaded correctly you will be able to compare.
I know you cannot read the written words on these pages. Don’t worry about it. Look at the sketches, and after each page I will type out what the words on the page were.
Armed only with these sketches and words, and this summary, the eight-Judge panel had to pick one photo of four printed in color on an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper. Do you think you could have done it? You will get your chance when I upload Folder J.
Page 1
[initial squiggle] High
cold
isolated
[horizontal line] horizon
[two squiggles] reflective
reflecting?
[Five parallel lines seen somewhat at an angle]
Parallel lines from below
like roof beams
come out from something
(line represents)
Wood (overlay?)
[Three parallel lines]
parallel lines
[sketch of a tube]
Hollow
like pipe or roller
may not be hollow
may be solid
Page 2
[three lines meeting at a point]
Sky
Bldg (building)
Bldg (building)
Stucco
Beige
[square inside square]
bldg inside enclosed area
large enclosed area
some kind of an enclosure
doorway but I don’t see one
[three parallel slanted lines]
Slanted
Daylight
because late in day
[wavy line]
flat roof, may be red
crenellations maybe
AOL break [underlined]
422 second contact
rusty color, brick color
motor noise outside of range of picture
Page 3
feels comfortable — wouldn’t grate on my nerves
something about it that I like.
Feels like a metal pipe
impressions of bird(s?) In the sky
[sketch of bird] soaring
Open gateway in their outside wall
[crosshatch inside arc]
metal hinged gate
Paved with [sketch] like cobblestone. Not cemented.
Sense that reflected item is a window — second floor or higher
[sketch] reflective
Page 4
[sketch that I thought was a building inside an enclosure]
light slants from left
structure within a structure
can’t see door or gate from this angle
main part of bldg in shadow
may be cement or adobe etc. (etc.) wall
something curvy about roof line
more or less square or oblong enclosure
—
may be historical site in the American southwest
Hispanic heritage
Site contains
– walls
– bldg
– strange roof
– reflective surface
– gate
Summary
“first impressions — high, cold, isolated.
“Reflective vertical surface. Saw parallel lines from below — like roof beams. They came out from something — a wall? I think they were would — or is that overlay? Repeatedly saw parallel lines — maybe metal and hollow? Maybe solid metal? Reminded me of conveyor belt.
“Then looked like two walls of the building, stucco, beige. All muted colors, light. Slanting daylight because late in day. Building within a wall, strange roof line, curve. Rusty color, brick color. Comfortable feel to it. Impression of soaring bird. Page to gate. Paved with cobblestone-like paving.
“Maybe historical site in American s.w.
“The Alamo?”
Part three. The target pool
Can you pick the photo that best matches my remote viewing? None of these pictures looks much like the Alamo to me! And yet, concentrating on what I had perceived — as revealed in my sketches, rather than in the story I attached to them — the judges were able to pretty easily conclude what it was I had perceived, however little I had been able to put it back together.
I was not privy to the deliberations or reasoning of the judges (ordinarily a viewer never gets to see the other three photos in the target pool) but I would make a small bet that they were able to eliminate one of the photos pretty quickly.
My next posting will show the picture that had been my target, and I think you will agree that this particular picture is the only one containing most of the elements I described.
Part four. The target, and why
This is the target.
CANTERBURY, New Hampshire
The Shaker dwelling-house bathroom at Canterbury bespeaks communal life. The sister who lives there placed the rocking chairs in front of sinks perhaps on a whim.
Does this look like the Alamo to you? If so, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. And yet, look at how many elements that I had described are in this picture.
* A reflective surface.
* Parallel lines seen from below, like roof beams, coming out from something (the wall).
* Wood, for sure (though I had suspected that “wood” was analytical overlay).
* parallel lines
* Repeated metal tubes, either hollow like pipe or rollers, or solid
lines that met at a point (which I correctly interpreted to be walls meeting)
* Beige color
* Parallel slanted lines representing daylight (which were actually reflecting light from an uneven source)
* The wavy line that I took to be a roof (which actually turns out to be the tops of the rocking chairs)
* Rusty color, brick color
* “Feels comfortable — wouldn’t grate on my nerves”
* “Something about it that I like”
* Feels like a metal pipe
* (even the impressions of a bird or birds soaring might be my mind trying to make sense of those two bright lights at the top of the picture, though I wouldn’t lay any particular weight on this point.)
* That reflective item in the picture that I was tempted to call window, but carefully described merely as reflective
* More or less square or oblong enclosure
* Historical site (though not in the American southwest)
Few of those items were in the other pictures.
Yet if my sketches and accompanying descriptions pretty accurately reflected what I was perceiving beneath a sensory level, the story that I made out of those elements would do nothing but mislead. It was a striking lesson — one that Skip had already driven home several times — that words come out of a different place (left brain, so to speak) than sketches.
I think this example also demonstrates that in fact remote viewers do make contact with reality at a level far beneath anything the senses can apprehend. I did not pick up so many elements of that photograph merely by chance. My analytical errors stem from inexperience in interpreting such input, and presumably could be greatly reduced by practice.
On that memorable Wednesday, among us we did 24 remote viewings, in three shifts of eight people, acting in turn as viewers, monitors, and judges. Of the 24, 8 were first-place matches and an additional six should have been first-place matches save for judging errors, as the panel of judges recognized as soon as they saw the correct answer. A matching rate of eight in 24 would be little better than chance, but 14 in 24 is far beyond anything that should happen by chance. Statisticians know how to score this, but I don’t, nor do I need to.
Now, we can’t go bragging that we made 14 first-place scorers when officially we made eight. Yet I think we all went home feeling pretty good because of course judging was a skill to be learned quite as much as monitoring or viewing, and some learning curve was to be expected.
More to the point, we did not need statistics to tell us that the process worked. There is all the difference in the world between reading about something, or hearing about it, on the one hand, and actually doing it yourself on the other. Just as with every other psychic skill I have investigated over the years, I’ve found that the reality diverged significantly from my expectations yet converged in the direction of greater, not lesser, importance.
It certainly was an interesting experience.