Back to: Remote Viewing: Structured Non-Local Perception
A Word Before We Begin
Let me be honest with you from the start.
Remote viewing is one of those subjects that tends to produce one of two reactions: immediate dismissal or uncritical enthusiasm. Both miss the point. Both do a disservice to what is a genuinely fascinating body of documented evidence that deserves the kind of careful, honest engagement you’d give any other important question.
The documented history here is not ambiguous in the way that many anomalous phenomena are. The United States government, through its intelligence apparatus, funded twenty-three years of research and operational deployment of remote viewing. The program involved serious scientists at serious institutions. The records are now public. This is not folklore, it is a documented chapter of American intelligence history that raises questions the scientific mainstream has not yet reckoned with honestly.
At the same time, it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend that we understand the mechanism behind what these sessions document. We don’t. The theoretical frameworks we’ll examine in this course are serious attempts to grapple with that question, but they are frameworks, not answers. The honest position is that something appears to be happening that our current models of mind and perception cannot fully account for, and that fact alone is worth sitting with.
What I hope you’ll bring to this course is the same quality of attention you’d bring to any genuine inquiry: a willingness to look at evidence without having decided in advance what it means, the capacity to hold uncertainty without needing to resolve it prematurely, and enough intellectual courage to follow the question wherever it leads.
That quality of attention is itself a form of practice. It’s not unrelated to what remote viewing, at its best, trains in a person the capacity to be present with experience before interpretation rushes in to tell you what you’re perceiving. That’s a skill worth developing regardless of whether you ever complete a formal viewing session.
“The first step in any genuine inquiry is agreeing to not know the answer before we begin. That sounds obvious. It turns out to be harder than it sounds.”
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