Courtney Brown, The Future of Scientific Remote Viewing |421|

Well suppose you want to use RV to shed light on a problem such as Global Warming, where many people have strong opinions.

David

David,
Let's take it to the next level now.

You are charged with your nation's defense and believe in psi and RV. You had a program that proved its efficacy under certain circumstances.

You have reason to believe that the enemy has developed a similar program.

A counter measure is to pollute the "airwaves" with chaff. You might do this by releasing misinformation stories to the general populace such that everyone is thinking about the misinformation, forming thoughts and images and opinions. Or you might just have a select group of people adept at sending psi signals, to whom you provide misinformation. The senders have to really believe what they are told. To keep them focused and sending strong counter signals, you might even give them a bogus project to work on. ......Just saying....
 
Well suppose you want to use RV to shed light on a problem such as Global Warming, where many people have strong opinions.

David

I think you have some built-in assumptions in that question. Why are you specifying RV should be used when the evidence shows it doesn't work well for that type of problem? You have to characterize the technique, learn what it can and can't do before you decide what to use it for. So you should be asking: what does the data show RV can do in a useful way? Then apply the technique to solve the problems it can solve.

You can also test individual RVers to see what types of problems they can solve. Joe MacMoneagle was extremely effective. If you want to try to use RV to shed light on Global Warming even if it seems that in general RV is not suitable for that purpose, get him or someone as good as him to do it.

Personally, my feeling is that psychic skills are not generally useful for predicting the future in a useful way. A few exceptionally talented individuals may be able to do it, but I would not expect much success in other situations.

Just because something can beat chance in the lab doesn't mean it can be used in a practical way. Precognitive dreams seem to be a real phenomenon but very often it is not until after you experience what the dream was predicting that you can tell that it was precognitive. They are real but not always useful or helpful. We know RV can see the future because in experiments RVers reported something that did not exist at the time of the experiment but did exist later. But that type of accidental success/failure does not prove RV can reliably be used to predict the future.
 
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This of course, does not bode well for using RV to solve important questions.

I guess I agree with you on this. RV as a practical tool has to be used with an understanding of its capabilities and limitations. But I don't claim to know what the cause of the limitations are, I am not coming out for or against the idea that mass consciousness can influence RVers. However I think a top notch psychic like Joe MacMoneagle would get the intended information. And I am against the idea that there are universes so close to ours that they could confuse RVers and explain RV failures.
 

I am kind of getting lost as to what point we are debating.

I am aware of experiment and it is part of why I don't think RV in general is useful for viewing the future. If I understand what I read on the web site, that experiment was supposed to be using a methodology that would work despite of the multiverse and it did not. There used to be another page which I can't find now which listed explicitly all the dire predictions that never happened.

My point about Joe MacMoneagle is that you have to consider the capabilities of the RVer not just the capabilities of the methodology. Maybe it sounded like I was defending RV, I didn't really mean to. I meant that methodology is not necessarily a substitute for a top notch psychic.

I remember reading about a group that was trying to make money using associative RV in the stock market or sports betting (my memory is fuzzy). I don't know if that is the same methodology Brown uses. They claimed it was working but I don't know if they are still doing it or how well it worked over the long run. Maybe someone reading this thread has more information and can share it here.
 
The whole point of the RVer not knowing the target when doing the viewing is said to work because psychic functioning is based on the intentions of the people involved in the viewing.

So it seems contradictory to say there can be interference from mass consciousness or alternate universes because the intentions of the people involved should exclude the extraneous information.

If all these types of interference were really possible then RVing without knowing the target shouldn't work in the first place.

(Even if you don't agree psychic functioning works based on intention, what ever the automatic process is that allows blind readings work should also exclude "interference". Explaining RV failures by invoking interference ignores the basis for using blind protocols.)
 
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If people can pick up the target by psychic means, then subjects like 'Climate Change' must be super hard to RV. Indeed, Eric may be closest to the mark:



David

To my way of thinking, if they can pick up the target by psychic means, the same power should be able to see the right universe and tell the difference between physical reality and collective consciousness. The fact that blind viewings ever work makes the "interference" hypothesis less credible not more.
 
To my way of thinking, if they can pick up the target by psychic means, the same power should be able to see the right universe and tell the difference between physical reality and collective consciousness. The fact that blind viewings ever work makes the "interference" hypothesis less credible not more.
Well I'm not sure about that. Suppose I was doing an RV experiment, and I was able (fat chance) to psychicly discover that the target was the earth at a future point to determined if it had been ravaged by 'climate change'. I think the fact that I don't believe in CC would bias my attempt to perform RV on this subject, because once I knew the target, I'd be pretty sure what I was going to 'see'. Conversely, among a group of CC believers, they might be subject to a reverse bias.

Certainly if you look at the summary, it would seem that looking just a few years ahead, they saw nothing much, but looking on to 2013, they 'saw' all sorts of problems:

In general, nearly all of the remote-viewing perceptions for all targets for the date 1 June 2008 appear to correspond with the physical state of those locations for that date. However, the remote viewing perceptions for 1 June 2013 appear much different, and they seem to suggest the following types of physical changes across many of the above geographical locations by mid-2013:


  1. Impacts from what appear to be large meteors leading to tsunamis and possible volcanism
  2. Extensive and forceful flooding of coastal areas
  3. Excessive solar radiation
  4. Storms and other severe weather

I certainly agree with you that using high quality psychics for this work is likely to be more important than tuning the protocol. This was something that woried me as I listened to the podcast - he seemed most interested in whether they would stay long enough to justify the learning phase.

David
 
When we are out of the body we are spirits. When we are spirits we go to spiritual realms.

I think Courtney's point was that we use the term 'spiritual' in way to wide a way. I agree. I see his POV - a paucity of language in which figurative notions become literal.

For example we are also spirits in our physical body - and our physical body itself is comprised of 'spirits' - even though we say it is physical. We navigate our reality employing more the language of poetry than science. So w know what we mean when we talk of a spiritual realm. Courtney fairly will say that this is no good if we are being disciplined and rational.

We have the same problem with other notions - like love and space. The Christian notion of love is not equal to my love of ice cream. The space in one of my cupboards is not equal to the infinite space of the universe. And yet they are. However deep knowledge is often characterised by precise language. There is the apocryphal assertion that the Inuit have 50 (whatever number is claimed) words for snow. But while that signals deep knowledge of what we call snow, its not remarkable. How many words do we have for tree, fish or rock?

Courtney made the animist declaration that everything is spirit. But we cannot usefully translate "I want a cup of coffee." into "Spirit wants a spirit of spirit." Even though the translation is true, it is also meaningless beyond a certain level.

To move to the next level of awareness we need to evolve our language.
 
Just because something can beat chance in the lab doesn't mean it can be used in a practical way. Precognitive dreams seem to be a real phenomenon but very often it is not until after you experience what the dream was predicting that you can tell that it was precognitive. They are real but not always useful or helpful. We know RV can see the future because in experiments RVers reported something that did not exist at the time of the experiment but did exist later. But that type of accidental success/failure does not prove RV can reliably be used to predict the future.

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?
 
Well I'm not sure about that. Suppose I was doing an RV experiment, and I was able (fat chance) to psychicly discover that the target was the earth at a future point to determined if it had been ravaged by 'climate change'. I think the fact that I don't believe in CC would bias my attempt to perform RV on this subject, because once I knew the target, I'd be pretty sure what I was going to 'see'. Conversely, among a group of CC believers, they might be subject to a reverse bias.

Certainly if you look at the summary, it would seem that looking just a few years ahead, they saw nothing much, but looking on to 2013, they 'saw' all sorts of problems:



I certainly agree with you that using high quality psychics for this work is likely to be more important than tuning the protocol. This was something that woried me as I listened to the podcast - he seemed most interested in whether they would stay long enough to justify the learning phase.

David

Do you think bias would have an effect even if the viewer didn't consciously know what the target is? Usually even after the viewing they don't know what the target is consciously. For example if you saw a house on a street near a bakery, you wouldn't know it was the home of a wanted terrorist. Or are you saying the bias influences the viewings because they unconsciously/psychically do know what the target is? If that is true there could be a lot of potential for the methodology to be improved by extracting that information that is unconscious.

If someone thinks they can learn something by studying the errors that is reasonable and they ought to do it. It would be more productive than just speculating.
In the meantime the capabilities of the methodology should be determined experimentally and then for practical purposes it should be used within its limitations.
 
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.
 
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I have been poking around a bit on the Farsight webpage, and came across this:

https://farsight.org/demo/Demo2008/RV_Demo_2008_Page1.html

Look at the predictions for 2013! It looks to me that RV can get pushed off beam by mass opinion - which Courtney seemed to be saying at various points in the discussion. It is slightly odd that he didn't add a comment of some sort in hindsight, but notice that the idea of a global warming catastrophe is marked as "Not yet confirmed" (CV18). Yhis may relate to something mentioned by Eric above:

If people can pick up the target by psychic means, then subjects like 'Climate Change' must be super hard to RV. Indeed, Eric may be closest to the mark:

This of course, does not bode well for using RV to solve important questions.

David

In the pre-interview thread I linked to a few talks by Courtney where he tackles these issues and also talks about the how the RV sequence (Target selection, Target viewing, Evaluation of data) is critical.

All of this leads me to this idea:
Many possible futures exist simultaneously, but which one is realized in the now moment is a matter of choice or randomness. And if the future is not fixed, the past is not fixed either because the past is constructed of memories and evidence and future discoveries delivering new evidence can change the story of the past. Our story about the past is composed of information networked together in the present creating a solid structure in the now moment which decreases in solidity and stability as we look forwards or backwards to a vanishing point.

Any being that can traverse space-time is not merely a space-traveler, or a time-traveler, but a story traveler. We exist in a cosmic hierarchy, and it is engaged in battles over not merely real-estate, but battles over story lines. So those who would pop into our reality and make edits to objects or memories or DNA are editing the story and not merely physical artifacts.

I have two ways of visualizing this idea:
Imagine walking down a winding path. The path is composed of puzzle pieces assembled together to form the image of the path. The puzzle is firmly assembled where you stand in the "now" moment, but as you look forwards or backwards down the path the puzzle pieces begin to separate and even further out they become completely disassembled and float in a cloud of possible configurations. As you walk along the path the puzzle pieces assemble together in front of you to form a solid path and dissolve behind you. It is the web of collective interactions that is the magical force that assembles the pieces underneath your feet.

Another way to visualize this:
Imagine you are a very small worm eating your way through a very large apple. As you progress you can choose your direction. Behind you is a little worm hole extending through the solid body of the apple a short distance. But because you are a very tiny worm inside a very large living apple, a short distance behind you the apple flesh grows back together sealing off your worm hole so that you cannot tell from which direction you came. So basically from where you are in this now moment you possess memories and observations which extend your path a short distance behind you, but a little further back and there are multiple paths that intersect with your path. And in front of you are multiple possible paths intersecting with your path. The photon passing through the double-slit has such a short worm hole trailing behind it that by the time it reaches the detector, no one can tell what its past was, so multiple possible pasts intersect with the now moment resulting in the interference pattern. We are much more complex full of more interactions, so our past trails a little further back, but neverthless we have a vanishing point in our history beyond which we cannot tell anything about our past and at that point multiple pasts intersect our present.

So "we are bugs trapped in the amber of this moment" with multiple paths intersecting the now moment. (I've been listening to Slaughterhouse Five... good book!)
 
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Do you think bias would have an effect even if the viewer didn't consciously know what the target is? Usually even after the viewing they don't know what the target is consciously. For example if you saw a house on a street near a bakery, you wouldn't know it was the home of a wanted terrorist. Or are you saying the bias influences the viewings because they unconsciously/psychically do know what the target is? If that is true there could be a lot of potential for the methodology to be improved by extracting that information that is unconscious.

If someone thinks they can learn something by studying the errors that is reasonable and they ought to do it. It would be more productive than just speculating.
In the meantime the capabilities of the methodology should be determined experimentally and then for practical purposes it should be used within its limitations.
Speculating for the purpose of generating hypotheses to test is useful.
Speculating to make excuses for embarrassing failures is not useful it is harmful. It proves nothing and spreads unfounded theories which people then repeat as if they were fact. In some fields it doesn't matter very much but where it touches on important topics like the afterlife and the nature of reality and the human soul, it is really a bad idea to spread unfounded speculation in a way that influences people's spiritual beliefs.
 
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Listened to the (always excellent) Marc Maron WTF podcast yesterday. Had this guy on... Interesting perspectives. Do it up!

https://books.google.co.nz/books/ab...AAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y

Fantasyland
is a journey that connects the dots between crazed franchises of true believers – a rich freak show tapestry from Mormons to Flat-Earthers and satanic panic, new age quacks to anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists of every stripe, creationists to climate change deniers, UFO-obsessives to gun-toting libertarians, showmen hucksters from P T Barnum to Trump himself, all topped off with a dangerous dose of anti-government paranoia and pseudoscience. Along the way, New York Times bestselling author Kurt Andersen has created a unique and raucous history of America and a new paradigm for understanding our post-factual world.
 
I do think that one can deliberately induce valid OBEs; actually, from personal experience, I know that can be done.
Alex interviewed a man named Robert Bruce on Skeptico a few years ago. He taught people how to have obe's. I knew someone who was adept at it as well. The practice is not without its risks though. As this person said, "While you are out of your body something else may enter it." And it might not be easy to rid oneself of it.
 
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Listened to the (always excellent) Marc Maron WTF podcast yesterday. Had this guy on... Interesting perspectives. Do it up!

https://books.google.co.nz/books/ab...AAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y

Why do we need political propaganda from an author and a podcast host who both garnered their success through silver-spoon nepotism, are angry 'drunk-uncle' nihilists, closet Antifa supporters, do not know their ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to science, logic, inference, investigation, spirituality nor remote viewing - and demonstrate a visceral hatred of two thirds of Americans?

I am an atheist political moderate - but I also have a good nose for social poseurs. Offer up one good reason why I should read garbage hate evangelism like this.
 
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Offer up one good reason why I should read garbage hate evangelism like this.

You might have noticed that I take my propaganda from a wide range of sources. :D I think that’s probably sensible and healthy. I guess we’re all on our own journey. The podcast was quite entertaining anyhow, but feel free to ignore.
 
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