human potential

One day in April, 2003, I realize that I want to go to Iona, the “holy isle” off the Scottish coast famous as St. Columba’s residence in the sixth century. Within a few days, I plan the trip. I borrow a backpack and fill it and a small suitcase with sweater and sweatshirt, warm woolen jacket, flannel shirt, two dress shirts, a pair of blue jeans, and a pair of good pants. This in addition to the short coat I would wear en route. For reading material, I choose, after some hesitation, The Lives of the Saints (Brendan, Cuthbert and Wilfred), and The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling. Both books are small, lightweight, and likely to match my mood.

Wednesday, June 4, a friend takes me to the Charlottesville bus station for the long bus ride to Dulles airport. I begin snoozing as soon as the bus starts at 9 a.m., figuring it will be long hours before I get to sleep in a bed again..

At Dulles, the woman at the check-in desk advises me to take their 1 p.m. to Newark, as they are experiencing weather delays all up and down the east coast, and it would be better for me to be in Newark waiting than in Dulles. Good thinking. As it is, the 1 p.m. doesn’t get off the runway until 2 p.m.. Then up out of the grey clouds into the bright blue sky, and 35 minutes later back down into the same grey overcast we’d left,  Departure for Scotland is scheduled 8:35 p.m.

Six hours is a long time to wait in an airport, although it does give one time to memorize the “security” announcements threatening to seize and destroy one’s unguarded luggage at the first opportunity. Also the no smoking announcements come every fifteen minutes. Six hours is a long time to wait in an airport.

The night before, Rita Warren had asked if she was picking up a bit of depression on my part. I said she was, and compared it to the apprehension I had had before I did my Gateway at The Monroe Institute in 1992, which my friend Kelly Neff had said was normal before a transformative experience.

Well, there I was with nothing pressing to do. Why not ask someone’s take on things? I wrote:

“For some years now, and increasingly in recent months, I have been in contact with what most would call past lives of mine. I don’t think of things quite that way anymore, but suffice it to say I have become aware of other lifetimes that are closely connected to mine. Being located outside time and space, these other lives are as “present tense” as mine. (We are all living in the eternal present, after all.) Of these other lives, the one who has shaped me most actively is a Welsh-born journalist, traveler, psychic investigator named David Poynter who lived from the 1870s to the 1930s. I am in contact with his spirit and he with mine, let’s put it that way. Since I learned the knack, I can contact him at will. In fact, in a TMI program in March, he came through on a tape recorder for the first time, which added a new dimension to our interaction.”

So here, sitting in Newark Airport (which, if you didn’t know it, is a smoke-free facility which promises to seize, damage or destroy your unattended luggage) I haul out my journal and ask him why the tension/depression/anxiety connected with the trip. “Why can’t I just do the trip as best I can and see what happens?”

“You are doing just that. Don’t be hard on yourself in an overbalancing way. But the other elements are there, too, we recognize

“Anxiety – lest plans not come through due to circumstances beyond your control.

“Depression – because you ask yourself `why am I doing this? I am not prepared, I am not even sure what I am doing, let alone why.’ You worry that you will go, return, and in between miss all your opportunities.

“Tension – because a good part of you knows better, a large part disagrees and both parts are waiting to see.”

Pretty good analysis, I’d say. Sitting unobtrusively on a bench against the wall in the waiting room, I play a TMI CD called “Catnapper” that lets you get a full sleep cycle in 30 minutes. It’s one of my favorites, and it works this time as always. I awaken refreshed. The terminal building is cold, and I am glad to be able to pull out a sweater from my backpack. Time passes, and the lounge very gradually fills. I spend some hours reading about the voyages of St. Brendan in The Lives of The Saints.

At nearly 7 p.m., I pull out my journal to ponder.

“Well, what am I to make of the voyages of St. Brendan? An otter who not only brings a fish, but firewood to cook it with! So much of it seems just Irish tall tales – and yet there is something at the root of it. That “something” is the character of St. Brendan himself. The tall tales mixed with the true tales – around him. So who was he really? His utter reliance on God shines through everything. But all their beliefs, their rituals, their world, really – it’s incomprehensible what it once must have meant. It doesn’t mean to us what it did to them. It can’t. And I was raised Catholic! I’m one of the few people left – or rather, my generation is – who can still remember even that shadow of the theology. But it wasn’t to us what it must have been to the people who wrote and read things like the life of St. Brendan. It’s almost inconceivable, now, that people could read that as non-fiction. I suspect there must have been a different sound to them – perhaps the difference between thinking humorous exaggeration straight fact. Yet there was more. They lived in a magical world, a world not shaped – cursed, I am tempted to say – by science as arbiter.”

My good friend Robert Clarke will explain to me how such tales are written, in effect, in code. Thus the otter carrying firewood is not meant to be a statement of fact but a  metaphor. It makes a lot more sense when he explains it.

Finally we board, we taxi, we fly. New England, Nova Scotia, Labrador, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, and then the British mainland pass beneath us while we eat, we snooze, and we eat again, working our way eastward through five time zones. Through much of the flight, as previously through much of the waiting time in the terminal, I am in a no-thought space, not sleeping, not waking. A weird feeling, to be moved from this quiet near-sleep state to a waking state by the small jolt of the wheels touching down. We land at 8:30 a.m. local time, and by 9:30 I am through passport control, have retrieved my luggage and gone through customs (no one there) and am waiting in a British Midlands line to get my boarding pass for the 9:45 to Manchester, England. The temperature is about 50, so I figure my packing was about right.

 

Never underestimate the power of a helpful suggestion, or encouragement. My friend Melynn Allen had an idea, and passed it along, and the result – so far – has been nearly 17 years’ worth of blog entries. Here, lightly edited, is what I find in my computer journal:

&&&

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Melynn calls, all excited with an idea. She has put together a blog and she wants to help me do the same. Using WordPress, which is what the HRPC blog is using, so I’m already familiar with it.

This really does sound like what I need. And she is enthusiastic about helping me, paying a karmic debt, she calls it. And that is precisely what I need – someone younger, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, energetic, who believes in me.

This could do what I had thought to do with my webpage (which, she points out, is static rather than dynamic.)

Photos, poems, transcripts – and it’s just what I do already – as she says.

Plus the potential to sell e-books, via a shopping cart. The shopping cart would cost money but everything else would be free, at least until we hit the limit of what they offer (20 GB she thought, which is a lot!), and then you upgrade.

This is perfect!

This really is what I want to do. As she says, I’m already doing it!

If I could sell e-books at $10 a pop (or whatever) it wouldn’t take all that many sales to provide as much money as the royalties on many more sales. $15 book – 10% royalty (net) – maybe eighty cents per book. So I need to sell a dozen books conventionally to match what I would make on one e-book more or less.

Everything would depend on my being able to get the blog out there and noticed – and she could help me do that.

Okay friends, thoughts on the subject? A theme for the blog? General commentary on the pattern of my life?

Well, choose.

Theme.

Intuition is your theme, how to live life connected more deeply. Religion and psychic affairs are two aspects of it, but intuition is the key. Misleading as a word, though, as “connection” would be, too. What you want is to lead people to realize that they don’t need to fear. Fearlessness, Fearless Frank. How about Fearless Living?

Interesting idea, not one I would have thought of. I’ll google it when I get on the machine.

What was your search for magical powers if it was not a reaching for a way to live without fear?

Fearless Living. I do like that. Or maybe Living Fearless, or Living Without Fear. No, the first sounds best. Well, that didn’t take long!

&&&

In the event, I didn’t call it Fearless Living or anything like it, and neither did I make any great amount of money out of book sales. But for years it provided me with  daily incentive to put something out there. It certainly encouraged me to post my conversations with the guys, and in a reciprocating process encouraged even more conversations.

From the habit of conversing came so much more: Chasing Smallwood, for instance, and The Cosmic Internet, and other books.

A few years after Rita Warren died, she and I began a long series of explorations, all of them posted piece by piece. Bob Friedman, following those conversations, suggested that he put them out as a book, and published them as Rita’s World  in two volumes, then Awakening from the 3D World and It’s All One World.

And besides the records of my conversations, I posted other things that drew my attention, striving to produce a source of hope and encouragement for fellow explorers. Seventeen years and counting, and all flowing out of a friend’s helpful suggestion. We influence so much more than we sometimes realize!

Sunday morning at 8 a.m., Stephan pre-empted Peter van Daam’s usual exercise period  to show the presentation he had intended to show on Friday night: Remote Viewing, the History of an Idea and Why It Matters. I was particularly interested to see him trace his work with psychic George McMullen, whose abilities he had documented in two classic books, The Secret Vaults of Time and The Alexandria Project. (Years ago, having read and been fascinated by the latter book, I had been glad to snap up George as a Hampton Roads author telling his own stories.) Stephan showed the intrinsic differences between lab research (concentration on variance from chance; concentration on a statistical outcome; statistical analysis as an end product, and involving only a single discipline) and applied research (statistics only a part of the analysis; use of psychics; no baseline for chance, and invariably multidisciplinary). He showed how in his projects he set out to create a “meta-mind” in which the psychics functioned as the intuitive side and the scientists as the analytical side. And he gave us insight into his four-team approach (teams of parapsychologists, archaeologists, specialists, and record keepers) in the pre-fieldwork, fieldwork and post fieldwork phases, and showed, in short, how he has gotten such interesting and important results. I was glad, after all, that we did get to see the presentation.

After another RV session (in which I did not participate, and which I therefore cannot describe) we came to Ingo Swan, who said he was tired of force-feeding audiences, and therefore had not prepared a talk but would answer whatever was asked, as this would tell him what people wanted him to talk about. Some ingots from the fire:

– In the 1980s he had thought RV doomed to disappear without a trace

– RVers and institutions like A.R.E. “fly in the face of the social commitment to keeping humans uninformed.”

– In order to have a controlled society, it would be important to get rid of telepathy.

– At 71, he said this appearance was perhaps his “swan song.” He is tired of  being here, wants a new body and is already planning his next life.

– If society were 60% telepathic, there would be no need to make decisions.

– We are trapped in our past, and trapped in our language. (The very word ESP for instance, sounds like it makes sense, but doesn’t.)

– We are born with ESP but the self gets collapsed down until we fit in. And we must fit in, because the others are aware when we don’t – even though they don’t know how they are aware.

– We are not taught Awareness 101. We should be taught, for example, Sensing Danger 101 (direct instinctual perception).

– Most of our switches (our abilities) are turned off. How do we turn them on? Simply find the switch and imagine it’s turned on. To turn it on, “Ask. Maybe you’ll get a dream.”

– “Don’t concentrate on blocks. Look for the good and wonderful in you.”

– “Compassion is the philosopher’s stone, the answer to everything. From compassion comes all the things that strengthen compassion.”

And for me, that was it. A three-day seminar followed, but I didn’t attend it. I’m sure that if it was as interesting as the conference that preceded it, the attendees went away happy.

[Footnote, 2024: Depending upon the depth of your interest in learning to practice remote viewing, you may be interested in Stephan Schwartz’ course. I have no vested interest in this; I get no kickbacks from it, but it’s hard to think of a better resource for those interested.: https://www.nemoseen.com/remote-viewing-course/ ]

 

Saturday’s first speaker was Edgar Evans Cayce. Hearing his quiet Virginian accent and his gentle and effective humor, I could imagine that his father must have sounded much the same. He described his father, and the process of giving readings, from first-hand memory, one of few people left alive who could do so. As the author, with his brother Hugh Lynn Cayce, of The Outer Limits of Edgar Cayce’s Power, he was able to speak with some knowledge and authority of where his father seemed to get information, and what variables affected it. The former included unconscious memory, telepathy with people living or dead, clairvoyance –Edgar Evans said his father was always right when exercising clairvoyance – and either the akashic records or the mind throughout time and space. The latter included the state of his health, and the emotions and ideals of those around him.

After Mr. Cayce, we did our second RV experiment. This time, three people, one of them a cameraman, went out to an unknown destination somewhere within 20 minutes of the A.R.E. When the 20 minutes was up, Stephan called them, ascertained that they were there, and led us through 15 minutes of RV’ing. When the team returned, they showed the film of where they had been, and it was not at all hard to tell whether or not you had hit the target, for the four possibilities were the Cape Henry lighthouse, a water park, an exhibition center with an RV exhibit (Winnebagos, not psychics!) and a road construction zone. Here, for the first time I actually was able to overcome my tendency toward analytical overlay and self-imposed consistency, and got many elements of the target, which was the lighthouse. A very funny feeling, to suddenly “get it.” By show of hands, it seemed much of the audience did, as well.

After lunch, Dale Graff talked about remote viewing and dreams, telling how an early experience while canoeing on a remote Canadian river led him into the field. In desperate need of a replacement pair of boots, he dreamed where he would find them (though he didn’t know at the time the meaning of the dream) and indeed found them – in the middle of nowhere, apparently abandoned by someone – the next morning. It’s the kind of thing that tends to get one’s attention, I suppose. He differentiates between what he calls CSP (Conscious State Psi) and DSP (Dream State Psi). He’s onto something important here; I wish I had better notes!

Then Henry Reed of the A.R.E. spoke of RV as a tool of self-realization, and I was particularly pleased to hear him single out Skip’s book as being explicitly about spirit. Henry gave a striking example of what he called “value added.” One could give an RVer a set of coordinates and ask “what’s there?” That’s standard practice. But one could then ask, for instance, “how can it be made a more peaceful place?” And this is not standard practice. Should it be? Henry mentioned the difference between Doing Trust and Being Trustworthy. Of course, they are not the same thing. The point is, if Remote Viewing is to become more than a parlor stunt or a scientific demonstration of possibility, all sort of ethical and developmental questions arise.

And after supper, Russell Targ spoke entertainingly and well about just this same kind of thing. He began by noting that Hal Puthoff had been put in front with the scientists while he himself was back with the mystics. Riding that laugh, he pointed out that a mystic never asks you to believe anything, but invites you to find out for yourself. (I found this particularly simpatico, of course. It was Bob Monroe’s approach, all the way.) .Harking back to the Vedic traditions, and ranging freely through modern quantum physics, Russell then talked about the use of psychic abilities for self-inquiry. As he put it, 100 years of data demonstrates that “materialism doesn’t make any sense.” He quoted the Buddha as saying that we give meaning to what happens to us, and paint ourselves into a corner, and we suffer. That is, suffering is the creation of our prejudgment; separation is illusion. To become free, we must trade our conditioned awareness for naked awareness.

 

Friday morning, Major Paul Smith told us how remote viewing joined the army, and again, if I don’t have any details it’s because he didn’t ask me soon enough to do this! Paul’s talk was followed by our first RV exercise, in which we were to intuit the contents of one of seven items, each inside a numbered paper bag, with the target to be chosen (by  random number generator) after our viewing. That target, a small metal heart, was picked by 32 participants, out of 184. The other targets were selected by 33, 30, 28, 25, 23, and 13 people. A pretty scattered result, you will agree. (I was one of the 13, still not having gotten the hang of it.)

After lunch, James Spottiswoode demonstrated how scientists work by showing how he had repeatedly gone after new data and then new interpretations of the data, trying and repeatedly failing to find environmental factors that appear to affect psychic functioning, until at last he found a still-unexplained correlation between very good – and very bad – functioning and certain times of day in terms of local sidereal time.

Skip Atwater then talked about his work, which bridges Remote Viewing and The Monroe Institute’s Hemi-Sync sound patterns. An entertaining speaker (who remembered to urge his listeners to buy his book!) he told of his first encounter with Bob Monroe, back when Skip was still an Army lieutenant unable to tell Monroe the truth about why he was there.

Friday evening there was a banquet at the local Ramada Inn, where many conference participants stayed. After the banquet, Stephan Schwartz was set to give a power-point presentation, but the technology gods decreed otherwise, and instead he spoke to us, straight from the heart, about the degree to which one person could make a difference. I went up to him afterward and told him I was glad the computer hadn’t worked, as otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten to hear what he did wind up saying. (And later we got to hear the originally scheduled presentation anyway.)

The Second annual Schwartzreport Conference, co-sponsored by IRVA, The A.R.E. and Atlantic University, was held Oct. 30 to Nov. 2, 2003, at the headquarters of the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) in Virginia Beach, Virginia. More than 270 participants came to hear and see virtually all of the founders of remote viewing in the same place at the same time.

Ingo Swan was there, and Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ. So were Paul Smith, Skip Atwater, Dale Graff and James Spottiswoode. (In fact, nearly the only living remote-viewing superstar not there was Joe McMoneagle.) Among them, they comprised witnesses to the birth and development of remote viewing as a discipline, first at SRI , then in the armed forces.

But the conference did not confine itself to history, fascinating though that was. Ringmaster Stephan Schwartz made sure that it moved on to other questions:, such as where do we go from here; how can remote viewing be used for self-actualization; what are the wider social and ethical implications. And the context was broadened ever farther by talks from Edgar Evans Cayce, sole surviving son of Edgar Cayce, who might in some senses be called the first and best remote viewer of all, and by Ingo Swan, in what he said might be his “swan song.”

Watching this many-ringed circus was particularly interesting to me, given my background as publisher of metaphysical material and sometime experimenter in psychic matters. I went to this conference because Russell Targ serves as editor of our Studies in Consciousness series, and because my company had published Skip Atwater’s book, and Joe McMoneagle’s, and even a little-known book of Ingo Swan’s. I hadn’t any doubts about the reality of remote viewing (though I hadn’t ever had any luck doing it), and I very much appreciate the achievement of these and other men and women who brought remote viewing into the mainstream.

But, I admit, I found myself asking why people needed to go to such lengths to “prove” that something could be done, when it is so easy, relatively speaking, to just do it. My natural inclination is with psychic explorer Robert Monroe, who used to advocate replacing our beliefs with knowns by means of personal experience. Of course, the limitation of that method is that it converts those beliefs into knowns for yourself and no one else. These scientists, and these military men, had set out to do something with much broader social implications, and I think that anyone who listened to the presentations would have to agree that they succeeded. The only way to disbelieve in remote viewing today is to be ignorant of the data.

(For those who still prefer personal experience, the program allowed participants to try their hand at three remote viewing experiments.)

Stephan Schwartz introduced the program, and the first speaker, Thursday night, was Dr. Harold Puthoff, who gave a great presentation on the early years of SRI. Had I known that the next day Paul Smith was going to ask me to write up the conference for this newsletter [the IRVA internal newsletter, of course], I would have taken notes! As it is, I am left with an impression of lucidity and unassuming brilliance. Hal walked us through the strange way in which he and Russell Targ, hooked up, how their careers went from physics to ever-weirder theory and practice, how the CIA (and CIA funding) got involved, and how things moved from there. I expect he would agree with the Grateful Dead, “What a long strange trip it’s been.”

 

Jim at Gettysburg

October 19, 2006.

Jim and I went to Gettysburg intending to help retrieve soldiers who may have died in the battle and remained fixed on earth. (Some souls who get killed may not realize that they are dead. Others may know that they are dead but may be essentially imprisoned by their beliefs about the afterlife, for instance thinking that they must lie in the grave waiting for the last trumpet and Judgment Day.) Drawing on our own experience at retrievals, we figured that we could help. We didn’t at first realize that as usual we were being employed – blunt instruments! – for greater purposes.

For those who came in late ….

For years, my friend Jim Szpajcher has felt the presence of a man named Hank, an ex-Confederate in the Civil War who lost his world with the South’s defeat and spent the rest of his life in the west, dispossessed and bitter. For years, similarly, I have felt the presence of Joseph, a man who became a Union officer. Despite our divergent past-life sympathies, Jim and I became friends a few years ago via the Voyagers Mailing List. But since he lives such a long way off, in Darkest Western Canada, the only times we see each other is when he comes to do programs at The Monroe Institute.

He arrived here again this week, giving himself a few days before starting the program, and suggested that he and I take a little trip up to Gettysburg. I agreed immediately, sensing that there was work for us there, though having little idea what.

When we got there it was after dark, and everything was closed. We went to the cemetery, and stood a few feet inside the open gate, and began a joint guided meditation, resulting in our entering a state both grounded and expanded state, with both of us feeling (intending) the presence of Joseph and Hank. So now we had four of us – two in bodies, two not – to work on the retrieval.

The whole experience took less than 15 minutes, but a lot happened. For one thing, we swept the area, sending our mind’s eyes around the immense scope of the battlefield, south along cemetery ridge, then over to seminary ridge and back up to the town, then sweeping from the right up to Culp’s Hill and around, and from the left to the Chambersburg Pike and around, trying to call anyone in the area who might need assistance. But then it began not to seem right to me that we were thinking of the men as still divided between union and confederate. I thought of the 1938 joint reunion (the 75^th anniversary of the battle), and we thought to call them all to a joint reunion.

Nice idea in itself, but that led us to call for help from the spirits of those who had been at that reunion (in the body, I mean). That was a big step, for thus we were using the dead to help the dead. That is, those who were dead but knew it, were thus able to contact those who had died and didn’t know it.

As they came together, I told them that whether they had thought of the union or their own state or the confederacy as their country, their country is what they had been fighting for, and their country needs them now. These dead soldiers are connected to millions of people walking around in bodies. They could work from inside (so to speak) to wake up the living to the dangers facing freedom today. You might not think they could, but I have little doubt that much of our internal mental and spiritual world is affected by just such influences.

We left feeling that we had accomplished something important.

Yet we wondered how it could be expanded upon. Surely it shouldn’t be necessary for us to visit every battlefield in the world to retrieve men and set their comrades to retrieving them. After a while we realized that place had little to do with the needs of spirits, and everything to do with our needs. It isn’t necessary to be on the spot, usually. It had been insisted on this time because being on the spot connected our intuitive evidence and sensory evidence. Now that we’ve started the process, physical presence on a given spot isn’t needed, any more than it was needed by those who have done retrievals after the Katrina hurricane, or the September 11 attacks, or the thousands of other natural and unnatural disasters that people quietly clean up after.

Of course Civil War veterans aren’t the only people needing retrieval, even in Gettysburg. Veterans from other wars are buried there, what about them? And I got that everyone who ever passed through Gettysburg could be similarly contacted, regardless whether they died there or ever lived there. It struck me only later – thinking of the number of people who have toured that battlefield in 140 years – that we are talking about millions of people, for this one spot alone!

Beyond Gettysburg, beyond America, are all those uncounted millions of souls needing a nudge to wake them up. Think just of the battlefields of the two world wars in Europe! Think of the Chinese civil war of the 1850s and ‘60s that killed more than a million people. Think of the victims of Stalin’s and Mao’s systematic slaughter. And the worse the circumstances of people’s deaths, the greater the beneficent effect of bringing those souls to safety.

Did we do what we think we did? And, does it mark a new and more efficient way to enlist the dead to help the living to assist the dead? We think so. If we are right so, this could become a huge development. There’s plenty of work to be done. Working one retrieval at a time, we will never clean up the backlog of souls needing retrieving. But if we can become merely the physical point of a vast army of spirits, everything changes.

Working together, the living and the dead can transform this side and the other side. Many of us know in our bones that now is the time. The other side has never been nearer to us in normal consciousness than it is now, and we fully expect it to continue to approach closer. I think it is time for us to step up our efforts to meet it half-way.  And it seems that this may be part of the way forward.