Actually Jim, if you read Dreamer by Andy Paquet and Change in a Flash by EG Krohn and J Kripal you may revise your opinion here.
For me precognition is like a lot of other 'gifts' - we can all do it a bit if we put our minds to it and practice. Some can do it a bit better but erratically, and so on. Consistent high quality performance is rare. Jeff Kripal makes a good point that such things (the high quality stuff) are inherently rare - not normal.
There are so many instances of 'predictions' failing. But they are not acts of precognition - just guesswork (being a subject matter expert does not improve your predictive power apparently) - and often just bullshit for profit. There are lots of reports of 'experts' doing worse than chance in predicting in their area of expertise.
If you follow the model that says time does not exist, precognition is non-existent too - but at some level of maybe divine consciousness. But sequentiality does exist - one event follows another in restricted scenarios like physical existence. We can't do making and drinking a cup of coffee out of sequence for instance (drink first and make afterwards for eg). But in our physical reality there are multiple complex sequences constantly intersecting such that 'predicting' stuff is hard (or impossible) if you are in the stream of sequential events. Try throwing a toy boat into a swollen fast flowing river and predict its path over 500 metres. No chance.
But outside of it, and closer to that state of no time, it must be possible to see what is. So imagine that you are in the stream of sequences and you have access to awareness that is beyond it and sees what is. It can communicate to you what is, which you must translate as 'what is to come' from the POV of a complex stream of sequences.
Back in the mid 1980s my partner and I were sharing time with a friend. Ed, who told us about contracting GBS. I was not overly engaged but my partner had a powerful sense she needed to know about the condition, and so paid attention and asked questions. Why that sense? In April 2008 I contracted GBS, and as I was lying on the lounge room floor I heard her ask the para-medics she had called whether they thought I had GBS. They had no idea, and maybe had not even heard of the condition. Months later, when I had recovered the power to speak, I asked her why she asked the para-medics whether I had GBS. She reminded me about the discussion with Ed. I had completely forgotten about it.
That is precognition. Did she know of her own accord or was she assisted to know?
The problem here is we don't really know how any of this works. So how can we say what RV should or should not do?
I am just using logic (colored by a little personal experience) to critique the notion that RV can be used to see any event, whether past, present or future, that lots of people are aware of and to which they have dedicated mental focus to trying to understand
because it seems logical that all of that mental energy, imagery, etc would be "out there" in the mental ether (or whatever it is) that psi taps into.
I think Jim's assertion that an RVer
should be able to filter out the noise and get right down to the
Truth is completely baseless. Why should that be the case? It seems like an arbitrary "should" given that we do not understand the source of the info obtained by RV, nor the processes involved.
Andy P and I have discussed this stuff a bit and I find that what he experiences and his outlook is similar to my experience and outlook. I have never read his book (sorry Andy), but I have read some of his academic papers. So I don't think my personal examples are too far out on a limb.
1. Strong personal connection - From my experience and from what I have gleaned from others (like Andy P), sometimes precognition occurs when there is a strong personal tie to the future event; especially a tie heavily laden with emotion. Andy had a precog event in which he saw a danger to himself; probably murder. When he encountered all of the same circumstances in real life in the future, he avoided the final step - the one that would have put him in a fatal position. I had a very clear precog that showed my mother being killed in a very unusual accident (statistically very tiny probability). In fact, that precog even included a voice over from my mother. She died in exactly that manner a couple months later (despite my warning to avoid the circumstances, which she thought was crazy talk).
2. A deeper layer of the self obediently confirming the ability to RV/precog - I have noticed that when I set my mind to attempting to prove that I can do precog and that it's real, I get experiences that do just that. I had been so busy with work and family matters, etc that I hadn't thought about paranormal or much of anything else for a long while. Someone, I think it may have been Andy P, got me interested again. I decided I would record my dreams whenever possible.
Within two or three nights I recorded a bizarre and kind of gross dream that I recalled vividly. I was in a train station and needed to use the restroom. The train station was extremely crowded. When I went to the restroom there was a man trying to fix the plumbing. There was human waste bubbling up from all of the toilets and even from the drains in the floor. The man told me, "This old place just wasn't built to handle this many people". I woke up grossed out and wondering what the heck that dream could have meant. But I sure remembered it to write it down. The next day I turned on the news. There had been some pretty bad snow storms and a vicious cold front moving through the Midwest and Northeast. The news was all about this. They did a segment on the impact of the weather on Chicago and it was all about how the trains couldn't leave due to the conditions and all of the people stuck at the train station. They went into how the plumbing of the station couldn't handle the volume and was failing. There was an interview with a worker who commented on the failing plumbing, "This old place just wasn't built to handle this many people". I don't take the train, I don't live anywhere near Chicago....I have nothing in common with the situation and I don't normally dream about plumbing, trains, train station and certainly not human waste.
How on earth did my mind pick up this event 12 hours or so before occurred? Why did it? My only answer is that it was a weird news story (unusually graphic) and I was trying to prove to myself that I still "had it" with regards to RV ability. Something in me and/or out there knew that this story would make for good proof and that I wouldn't ignore such a gross dream. So there may well have been some intent involved, but it was beyond my conscious control for sure.
3. Conscious intent to RV a specific target - IMO, this takes training and a personal predisposition, but can be done. Some individuals are more adept than others. Each adept has their own specialty. To RV a distant but contemporaneous target is one skill set, but does not necessarily cross over to viewing targets in the past or future. All of this involved precisely formulated limited protocol with as little ambiguity as possible. Tell me what is at this set of coordinates. Tell me what will happen in two weeks at this set of coordinates. IMO, what Courtney is trying to do with 911, Kennedy, climate change is way too open ended and way too susceptible to the biases of the RVer as well as psychic junk in the collective mind of the populace as well as his own as the target setter. I'm willing to bet that what the RVers "saw" conforms to Courtney's own beliefs about the situations. If Jim thinks there is a way to get past all of those hurdles to RVing open ended broad future potentials, I'm all ears.