human potential

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.

 

Exercise 11 Retrieval and visit.

The point of the final exercise was for us to bring back information that could be validated right there. Bruce accomplished this by having us each write on a slip of paper the name of someone we knew who was deceased. We then each drew a slip and went to visit that person. While we did this, Bruce, in the background, gave us questions to ask and suggestions as to what kinds of distinctions to look for. At the end of the exercise, when we each in turn reported what we got, we did not tell the name until after Bruce asked, “does that sound familiar to anybody?”

[recreated from notes made with eyes closed during the exercise]

Immediately, almost before the exercise began, I had an impression of being in some city, among tall red brick buildings. Some kind of arch was involved. Bruce’s visualization has us walking through dark woods, but my own goes its stubborn separate way, and I’m walking in sunlight though a field at the edge of the woods, with the trees to my right. Strong impressions of green and moistness.

My helper, standing to my left, is Simon, who appears to be English, middle-aged. I tell him what I am there to do, and give him the name.

“I know him. Let’s go.” And with that we’re back in that same city scene, standing on the sidewalk of the street by those same buildings, with traffic going by.

There’s a man standing there. We shake hands. He is young – 30s? – vigorous, very definite. Strong, like a working-man. I use the words in my mind “bluff, downright.” He is a very direct person, humorous, matter-of-fact. Sort of easy-going, not temperamental. He is not in a suit, not in coveralls. Casually dressed, without much concern over what he’s wearing.

Twinkling eyes. Compact, vigorous. Healthy.

It isn’t a cold day, but not blazing hot either.

He seems to know who I am and why I’m there. He knows the guide, too. He is playing along with us, casual, amused. He knows he is dead, and it’s okay. He died worn out somehow, like a long sickness but not quite. Worn out. His heart gave out. He was older when he died, but he likes this age. I wonder if he was an architect, and this one of his buildings.

He liked bricks, and boats. Building things? Sailing around in motor boats?

Bruce asked us to get some memory that the submitter of the name would remember. I got a composite of things: outdoors. backpacking. Riding horses? The person is much younger, related to him.

Bruce asked us to get a favorite thing that he liked to do. I got, growing things. A favorite thing was flower window pots, flower boxes.

Bruce asked us to get a lifetime scene that the submitter of the name was in and would remember. I got an impression of lake, trees, mountains, horses. Campfire? Sleeping bags?

Bruce asked us to get evidence for the reality of the visit. I got a square glass fishbowl with one fish, on an orange shelf. [This turned out to refer to another submitter’s target.]

Bruce asked us to get a message. I got “Granite. Take it for granite,” which I took to be perhaps an inside joke.

I tried again, and got “you can camp and ride forever if you wish.”

The proof of the visit was to be an address, either 16 or 133 College Street, perhaps in Massachusetts.

As you can see, these were very definite impressions, that could very easily have been wrong. When Bruce asked if the description were familiar to anyone, one participant said it was his brother, and listed the reasons why. And indeed, that was the name I had drawn. He was very pleased, and so was I. I’d say eight of the ten participants got enough detail for the submitter to identify the contact. In a couple of cases, the amount of details reported was striking.

—-

I had submitted a request that someone visit my mother. As it happened, not only did the person who drew her name report, but another woman (who I knew ahead of time would be the one to contact mom) returned a report that sounded very much like mom and apparently not a lot like the name she had drawn.

The woman who had drawn mom’s name seemed to me to have missed the target. None of this sounded like my mother except the part about not liking loud noises. She said the helper was a Mexican man. Bright colors. Cheerful. Southwest US, desert-like. A house on a hill. Seated on a rocker on a porch. Older, hair grey and in a bun. Longish blue dress. An impression of a really high bridge. She didn’t speak. Peaceful. Didn’t like loud noises. Was by herself. Her hobby was rocks.

The woman who I had expected to report on mom found that the helper was a black man named Joe.

Kind of a round person. Short, curly red hair. Blue eyes. On a swing, younger. Her legs hurt. Diabetes. Maybe had a couple of toes amputated? An impression of a fish pond and white butterflies. She liked gardening and cooking. Laughed a lot, wore a dress with white ruffles. An impression that she shared joked with the submitter. Had a secret love of gambling.

Several hits here: Red hair, liked gardening and cooking, laughed a lot. I don’t know about the butterflies, but I know she had a fishpond by the house she grew up in, and that was a very happy household, i gather. Her legs would have hurt, and at the end, if she had lived, they would have had to take off her foot. But If she had a secret love of gambling, it was a well-kept secret!

In all, a great and productive workshop.

After lunch, second day.

Exercise 10 Belief System Retrieval exercise.

[recreated from notes made with eyes closed during the exercise]

This became very strange. Bruce was narrating a visualization that had us at a beach. Mine morphed into a road, instead. I walked up to a Midwest road and somehow wound up in a car, driving down a long winding road. I asked for a helper, and got George, situated somewhat to my left.

“Are you physical?” “No.” I got that the person I was looking for was “at nowhere.”

“George, is this a person who has no ideas about belief systems?”

We are outdoors. Open sky, desert, but it is not a definite place. Nobody in sight. The person was hiding in invisibility.

“I wish you to let me see you,” I said.. “Come visit with me. Why are you hiding?”

“I am not hiding, I’m right in front of you.”

“Why can’t I see you?”

“That’s your problem.”

“I wish to see you.”

“Then look.”

“I am willing to be assisted to see. George? How can I see?”

“Pretend.”

“Okay.” I pretend a woman in a bathing suit.

“Nope.”

I pretend an old man in overalls.

“Nope.”

“I don’t want to guess. Please show me.”

“You are seeing through me.”

Is this a pun? Is the being transparent? I think to ask: “Are you human?”

“Finally! No.”

“Do you connect with me somehow?”

“Yes,” I get, “but not via Earth.”

“Is part of myself not human?”

“Pre-human.”

“Are you the sand?”

“I am all of it.”

“The whole reality-scene?”

“Yes.”

Huh! “Can I help you somehow?”

“This is too static. I want change.”

“Did you call for me?”

“Called for assistance.”

“Would you want to be in a body? That is, like a person?”

Apparently it didn’t. It said that it was too limited as it was and wanted complications, but didn’t want a total change in being.

“I see. George, can you help me here? What can I do?”

“Remember love.”

“Oh yes.” As Bruce had taught us, I felt love and projected it to the being that I couldn’t perceive. I saw that it became an energy in the landscape, sacred-spot energy. I asked where, and was told somewhere that would verify it to me. It was going where I’m going, and we could work together. [Today, all there years later, I wonder if this meant Egypt, which I would visit 14 years later,  in 2019. No way to know, of course.]

I asked George his part in this. He said he was a moderator between humans and non-humans.

“Any verification?”

“You will know soon.”

“Can you help me move[to the next thing in my life]?”

“Yes. You will know.”

I knew that I was returning to normal life, the energy was going to the land, and George was on to his next “job.” I asked what belief system territory he worked in, and he told me it was outside the belief-system territories, at the interface between human and non-human energy systems.

So why did they choose me? It was for my sake, as much as for its. It could have used any of several, but used me next, for training. I said, “training?” Even non-humans need training..

So how do I verify all this? There would be an energy aura boost right away that I would perceive and be able to use. And this in fact did turn out to be true.

 

Exercise 9 First Retrieval Exercise.

[recreated from notes made with eyes closed during the exercise]

I somehow knew the guide I had attracted was male, though I didn’t have clear image of him. I thought his name was Charlie, or maybe Ernie. I saw an image of a black bench, placed near an inner door leading into a bar, or a restaurant, or a pub, somewhere in London. The bench was black and smooth (later it occurred to me that the black smoothness might be horsehair) covered with some kind of lacework, or crocheting, or something. Very colorful.

The handwork had been made by a woman in whose presence I was. Her name was – Angie? She looked to be in her 70s, wearing a black or dark dress, long. I knew that she had spent her life in that room, more or less. She was one of the proprietors.

I asked her if she knew that she was dead. “Oh yes,” she said, she knew. She was staying around because she was attached to that colorful cloth, which she had made. She had no family left. She had died peacefully and alone in her old age, in the ‘40s after the war. I got 1947. She knew she had died, but hadn’t gone on because she had no afterlife beliefs and so had nowhere to go. She said, under questioning, that she was okay with staying there, though she was getting bored, and missed her husband Charlie. She had lived with Charlie 50 years. At about the same time that I realized that guide Charlie was the same person as husband Charlie, she perceived him for the first time.

“Well, Charlie, I didn’t see you there!”

So was she ready to go on? “Yes – if it’s really Charlie.”

“How could I demonstrate it to you?”

“Well, I’m becoming persuaded that it’s possible by the questions you ask – and by the fact that you are here, too.”

Before they moved on, I wanted verification if possible. I asked her name, and got “Cooper Thestlewaite.” My doubter kicked in, thinking “Alice Cooper?” (I was misremembering the name I had gotten, Angie, as Alice.) In response, I got the name “Elize.”

Charlie had died in a bombing in 1941. He was a street warden and a collapsing wall fell on him. He was already in his “late years” — 50s or 60s, I gathered. And was Elize in her 70s? She said she had added to her age as she felt the years pass! So when had she died? In 1961, I think she said, or it might have been that she was 61 when she died. Neither of those conjectures square with her having lived with Charlie for 50 years!

I asked if she knew when is it now. She said, “Later.” [than when she died] “Don’t know when.” I asked for proof that I visited you? She said, “Tea Caddy, Stoke- on-Trent. China from pottery.” That didn’t sound very evidential. I asked again for proof, and she gave me what I took to be the name of their place, the “Meat Pie Inn, London.” When I asked Charlie, I got “: ___ Horse Inn, Lombard Street, Ealing, London.” (Is Ealing in London?)

I asked, “Can I help you?” and she said, “You have done, dearie.” I was moved to say, “Bless you my dear. Go ahead then, and I will follow.” They were going to the England of their youth, to an idealized version of the countryside, so that they could have a chance to live a long-held fantasy. They both know that they’re dead, they just want to play out the fantasy first I thought, “Well don’t you both look nice?” They had changed to be as they must have been in their early 30s, maybe. She is not pretty, but pleasant. He is slim, sharp featured, but kindly.

I told them to enjoy themselves, but remember, that they can go on when they want to. Charlie knows. The key somehow was the knitted thing she put on the black – horsehair?—bench and cared about. That’s why she stayed there rather than elsewhere

 

On July 18 and 19, 2005. a few months before I retired from Hampton Roads Publishing Company, we sponsored an “Exploring the Afterlife” workshop by Bruce Moen. He set out to teach, in two days, how to explore the afterlife, contact people who are deceased, and bring back verifiable details to demonstrate that the contact was not just fantasy. Big ambition! And he succeeded, as I’ll show. This report is an edited version of what I wrote up at the time.

We were a small group, probably all in our forties and above. We got comfortable with each other, mostly ate meals together, started joking and teasing, and it all helped. So did Bruce’s relaxed, informal delivery. He proceeded methodically, alternating between lecturing and guiding exercises. He is unhurried, not concerned lest his listeners may get impatient; his material is very well thought out. By the time we go to actually try connecting – it works. (The material and techniques Bruce uses in his workshops is all included in his Afterlife Knowledge Guidebook, which I edited and we published. I’m pretty sure that if you’re willing to practice, the method will work for you as it did for us, even without the advantage of group energy.

Monday July 18

“Trust is always the first issue,” Bruce says. The second key issue is remembering. He talks about state-specific memory and areas of consciousness.

Exercise 1 is Relaxation. Bruce discusses relaxation as a specific area of consciousness.

Exercise 2 is Energy Gathering From Below.

Exercise 3 Energy Gathering From Below again, adding cascades to increase the amount of energy. There is so much energy, I am nearly spacing out, and at the end I have an energy buzz.

Bruce talks about Affirmations and Placing Intent, reminding us to use clear, positive wording and present tense.

Exercise 4 is Placing Intent. Using the example of waiting for a red light to change to green. What Bruce calls his Silly Little Finger Bending Exercise, trying to detect that moment of intent just before something actually moves.

After lunch, he talks about the interpreter and the perceiver. He says he got so good at not talking to himself during exercises that he could feel when he was about to talk and could then not-do it. He talks about the interpreter finding the “nearest similar thing” and the language barrier. Perceiver to perceiver, and interpreter translates. Bruce says if you think you’re awake, imagine you are somewhere else (somewhere specific) and if you are there—you were in Focus 10! Deep relaxing breaths will help relax away too much thought.

Beliefs, Identity and Perception. “My beliefs define my identity.” Depression, disorientation, disassociation. “Don’t know who I am.” Might die, or should die soon. Belief system crash.

Exercise 5 Energy Gathering From Above. Whew! Strong energy and a lot of visuals, mostly forgotten. Half an inch from clicking out. Brought in energy from the top and bottom at the same time. To describe the gathering from above and below, I would describe a translucent shimmering sheath. Pulsed above and below alternately, and sometimes simultaneously. Tried swirling the energy in figure eights.

Exercise 6 Feeling Love. If you can’t remember when you were feeling love or loved, remember when you were doing something you loved doing.

Exercise 7 Projecting Love to specific individuals. I send to those who seem to be the ones who need it most. Sent twice to each. Feel full of energy, abuzz from too much, in fact.

“Heart Intelligence.” Ask a question, focus attention at top of breastbone more or less, and listen. Anything that happens may be an answer in some way. If you don’t immediately understand, say “I am willing to be receiving more.”

Tuesday July 19

Methods for Afterlife Exploration. “Afterlife” a misnomer; there’s just life. Same techniques can explore any reality. Other methods include dreaming, lucid dreaming, OBEs.

Bruce’s method of focused attention: Areas of consciousness, imagination v. fantasy, imagination as a means of perception. fantasy <– (grey area) –>  real.

Unexpected events? Play along.

Exercise 8 Priming the Pump. Remembering specific things from the past. Using non-physical senses

knowing <—> like reality

** Image quality does not correlate with the degree of reality of the image **

Areas of consciousness. Monroe-derived map: Focus 23, stuck and isolated; Focus 24-26, stuck with beliefs. (Group-held beliefs create non-physical realities.)  Focus 27, not stuck, in free association with others.

You can always ask the helpers to guide you to explore anything you want to explore.