Mindblogging

This week, University of Hertfordshire professor Richard Wiseman will use Twitter to conduct a remote viewing outbounder experiment. At 3 PM (UK-time) each day this week, Professor Wiseman will travel to a certain location. Participants will then try to get an impression of where he is and “tweet” this information to Wiseman’s Twitter account. Thirty minutes later, Wiseman will upload photographs of the target location.

While it will be good fun, I would hope the good professor will make everyone well aware that this experiment is not being conducted under laboratory conditions. I also have concerns that reading the Twitter stream will unduly influence the imagination of many participants. However, if a participant were to simply concentrate on Wiseman’s location rather than the Twitter feed, I would think some good results could be obtained.

It would be interesting to have some of the more seasoned RVers I know join in on Wiseman’s experiment. If you’d like to try your hand, go to his Twitter Experiment website, visit his blog, or follow his Twitter feed.

As I mentioned earlier,???????? remote viewer Joseph McMoneagle will be holding a workshop at the Rhine Center this month.

I went to one two years ago and was blown away. Its pricey but definitely worth it!

Here are the details of the one-day workshop:

Remote Viewing with Psychic Spy Joe McMoneagle

Joe McMoneagle, former Stargate “psychic spy” and remote viewer extraordinaire, returns to Durham’s Rhine for a day-long remote-viewing workshop Saturday, June 28th as part of the Rhine’s upcoming “Psi Camp” program. Details are sketchy at this point but one thing’s for certain: I’m going!

Check the Rhine’s website for further details, or keep it tuned to Mindblogging.com.

I spent some time yesterday (against my better judgement) defending psi on a local mailing list. I knew it was a futile effort but the bait was soooo tempting that I couldn’t resist. I fired off a couple of well-thought-out emails and waited for the inevitable “show me the research” replies, to which I replied with a link to Puthoff and Targ’s excellent (if ever-so-slightly flawed) remote viewing paper in IEEE’s Proceedings.
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Dr. Ed May’s Cognitive Sciences Laboratory website has a nice video clip showing Joe McMoneagle doing a precognitive remote viewing session. It also features Joe discussing the process, which I find just as interesting.

I don’t think Joe always works with a dramatic soundtrack playing in the background. Nor do I think he always wears a suit. Then again, maybe if I wore a suit and played dramatic music I’d get results like he does!

That, and if I remote-viewed full-time for 35 years. That would help, too!

Its been two years since I did any real remote viewing (and a long time since). I take it for granted that it can be done as I’ve done it myself.

Traveling on busines tonight, it struck me again just how astonishing the skill of remote viewing truly is. I suppose I’ve been so caught up in the study of it, perhaps keeping it at arm’s length in many ways, that I’ve forgotten how incredibly revolutionary it is.

It truly is an astonishing skill: one that I will strive to improve from now on.

I just finished reading Blink, the excellent book by Malcolm Gladwell exploring the power of the first impressions. While the book seems a bit less sure-footed than his earlier book The Tipping Point, it did provide useful insight which may be applied to remote viewing.

When my did my first remote viewing workshop with Joe McMoneagle, Joe instructed us to draw our impressions rather than put them into words. Doing so seemed to provide me many “hits.” An image would come and I would draw it, usually with some aspect of the target represented. However, when I put my thoughts into words, frequently I am not as successful.

Research mentioned in Blink may provide a big clue as to why this is. Psychologists Jonathan W. Schooler, Stellan Ohlsson, and Kevin Brooks co-authored a paper called “Thoughts Beyond Words: When Language Overshadows Insight.” Essentially, th act of reducing an image down to fit into words causes the brain to lose track of the original image. The image in the mind is altered to match the describing words.

The same could also be a big stumbling block to remote viewing, where the target’s wispy impressions vanish when the brain’s verbal section kicks in to describe them. It shows me how I would be much better off sticking to sketching my impressions.

You can read more about the researcher’s fascinating insights at this article: Words Get In The Way.

Last night I tried a new approach to remote viewing. I actually practiced! All joking aside, I tried applying visualization to my session, with interesting results.

I’m a rank amateur viewer, as once-a-month viewing won’t get me anywhere near Joe McMoneagle-quality results. Still, I have had a few sessions that knocked my socks off.

Practiced remote viewers know what I’m talking about. When you get a hit on a target – when you really connect to it – the reward is a blast of adrenaline! Endorphins rush like rivers throughout your body. It’s a huge rush when it happens. You feel like a god!

Being that I don’t put nearly enough practice into remote viewing, the viewing I usually do has taught me, ah, how should I put this? It’s taught me how failure feels! I am quite familiar with the bummed-out feeling of describing a building when the target is a flower.

So here’s where my approach differed. There was one session I described on Mindblogging where I really connected with the target, the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I was jacked up for an hour or two after that session, my mind just buzzing!

For last night’s viewing session, I decided to reach out for that elated feeling before my session. I imagined myself feeling as high as I do when I occasionally knock an RV session out of the park. I figure if I can remember that feeling – and latch onto it – perhaps the stellar results would follow. I closed my eyes and found it rather easy to go back to this euphoric state. To some extent, at least.

You know what? I may be on to something here. I won’t say I nailed the target I worked using this method. It was a UFO target, a target type which is notoriously tricky. I do believe I described it well enough that an impartial observer could match it with the target. I did seem to get impressions from the session that are normally absent from the duds I’ve been prone to turn in, almost like a different part of my mind was working.

Athletes use visualization all the time to perfect their athletic performance. Same with professional musicians. Remote viewing is a mind exercise, so it follows that the same visualization steps can also improve one’s RV.

I can’t wait to work some more targets this evening and see if my performance improves.