A successful remote viewing (1)

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.