HOW TO REMOTE VIEW
Remote viewing is a mind-body discipline. After exploring the in-depth research behind remote viewing, you may be interested in trying a session yourself. Learn how to hold a viewing session and interpret the results, as well as consider the consequences of accessing non-local information.
Remote Viewing (RV) is probably going to feel very different from anything you’ve ever done before. That’s because it’s all about learning to unblock your feelings, hunches and intuitive glimpses. People like musicians and artists, those who are trained to go with the the flow, are more familiar with the creative process and tend to feel more comfortable with it. RV involves letting going of your preconceived ideas about what you are perceiving and instead, just going with the flow of things.
BE A PSYCHIC DETECTIVE
Remote viewing involves a paradox: the more confident you feel during a session, the less likely you are to be accurate. What this means is that during an RV session, you’re acting like a psychic detective, looking for clues within your own awareness for something you can’t physically see or touch. Your conscious mind will probably tell you that it won’t work. But it’s wrong: It does work.
During an RV session, our conscious minds, which usually act like they know what’s going on at every moment, have to surrender to the unknown. Our conscious minds like hard, concrete information: RV signals tend to be soft. Our conscious minds like certainty: RV sessions are the embodiment of uncertainty. Our conscious minds like to be right, as much as possible: while doing RV, we have no idea if we are right or not. And often after getting to see our feedback picture, we’ll see a lot that we missed. And things we made up that aren’t there.
RV is really a big ego buster. It’s humbling for your conscious mind to accept that it’s not as good as your subtle mind at this task, but it will get used to it. You just have to accept the idea that there are no bad RV sessions, if you learn something about yourself every time you do one.
And your conscious mind also has to learn to get together with your unconscious mind: the one who has access to non-local information. Believe me, it’s a really profound learning experience to find out that your conscious mind, who feels like it’s in control of your waking life, can only go so far before it has to hand off it’s job to another part of your awareness, your non-local self.
The first step in learning to be good at RV is letting go of the need to be right all the time.
This is a big deal for many of us but it’s good for you: you learn more when you’re wrong about something than when you’re right, and RV is no different.
Just so you know, there are many different styles of remote viewing, the main branches being Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV) and Extended Remote Viewing (ERV). The difference between these two styles is that CRV originates from psychic Ingo Swann and is a written protocol with defined stages. ERV on the other hand is an earlier system that is more like stream of thought and doesn’t necessarily require pen and paper: you can use a digital or tape recorder to record your impressions. I’m not aware of any evidence that suggests that one system is more accurate than another. However, I learned the CRV system so my ideas stem from that line of thinking.
Now it’s quite possible that you are a natural psychic and already have your own system for viewing. Just stick with what works for you. There’s no right or wrong here. But if you’ve never done anything like this before, you can follow the steps below.
HOW TO BEGIN REMOTE VIEWING
The first thing that you want to do is find a quiet place where you won’t be distracted. RV is not so much a mental process as a sensing protocol. You use your awareness to become aware of your entire body and what its feeling. It’s not just about mental concentration.
But the first step is to quiet your mind in any way that suits you. It’s called a cool down period. During an RV session, you want as little mental noise as possible.
HAVE SOMEONE ELSE SELECT A RANGE OF TARGETS
What you’re going to need to practice are some picture targets chosen for you in advance by a friend or a helper. These should be pictures cut from magazines and pasted on sheets of blank, white paper, perhaps ten or so, one picture per sheet. Pictures of people, architecture, nature, and travel are often good choices. Don’t pick a target picture that may be offensive or disturbing to the viewer.
The target pictures should be of real world objects, events, or places, not computer graphics. Have your friend stack them in a manilla envelope face down and say absolutely nothing about them to you. You’ll view them one at a time, getting feedback after each session from the facedown target at the top of the pile.
The main idea behind RV is to increase your sensitivity to unconscious information that you already have available to you. And that’s a lot of information.
Studies show that we have over 20 million bits of information from our physical senses each second. (And that’s not counting non-local RV-type information). But we are consciously aware of only 16 bits. That’s a loss of more than 99.999 percent of the information that we could have access too. The information is still there, but it’s buried in our unconscious mind. Your job is to make sense of it and write it down before your conscious mind interferes in some way.
The goal of RV or any type of psychic activity is to become more sensitive to the really subtle information: to access it without distorting it. You’re accessing a hidden channel of non-local information that is normally not available to you consciously.
One way to practice this during the day is to see how much sensory information you can describe in your immediate environment, as accurately as possible. You may think you know what’s in your surroundings, but it if really take a look, you’ll see it’s more varied than you imagined. There are more shades of colors, more patterns, more contrasts than your conscious mental image contains.
That’s because most of the sensory information you experience each moment is generated by your brain, about 80 percent to be exact. Only about twenty percent of your perceived sensory information is coming from outside you. The rest is created by your physical mind to save energy and time: it’s making its best guess about what’s going on around you based on a small sampling of the environment. What you think you’re seeing is actually a hallucination of sorts.
An example of this are the saccades that your eyes constantly make: the small flitting motions that your eyes exhibit about three times a second. They’re constantly scanning your environment with small, jumpy motions. But your brain edits this out for you and so when you look around, things seem still. Even if you look at your eyes in a mirror you won’t see the saccades, they’re edited out from your consciousness.
So, when you’re practicing viewing, you’re attempting to describe very subtle information that is much weaker than your conscious perceptions. If you’re describing a photo target, and the image in your mind is 3D and very colorful, you’re probably making it up! True RV impressions are very subtle, fleeting, and transient. Many people don’t ever “see” anything while they’re viewing. They may just get sensory impressions without knowing how they got them. The main thing is to write it down before the information disappears into your mind’s deletion trash bin.
After “cooling down” for a few minutes, write down the date, time and any ideas you want to let go of that may distract you while viewing. Then you want to begin the session by describing the most basic impressions you have of the target site, event, or person. What do you feel is the predominant thing in the target. Is it natural or artificial? Land, water? Motion or energy? Pick one or two of these descriptors and write them down.
DON’T SECOND GUESS YOURSELF
The main thing is not to second guess yourself. Write down the first thing that comes to your mind. The fainter, the better. Just make sure you write down the information as descriptively as possible and don’t judge anything. Remember, your job is to describe, not define, what’s going on at the target site.
The information isn’t just coming from your mind, it’s coming from your autonomic nervous system too. The idea is that your unconscious already knows everything there is to know about the target, it just has to communicate that to your conscious mind. It does that through your body with very subtle sensations and feelings and that take time.
After a few minutes, proceed to describe basic sensory information, like visuals, smells, tastes and temperatures. Then you may start perceiving sizes, shapes and patterns. What viewers call Dimensionals. You may even start to feel an emotional reaction to the target. Just make sure not to omit anything. Loud, persistent images are most likely mental noise. Write that info down too, just make sure you note that it is probably analysis on your part and not coming from the the target.
Eventually, you’ll want to draw sketch. Take your time and don’t worry about how your sketch looks. Finally, imagine yourself floating several hundred feet over the target area. Is there anything surprising about the target that you can perceive? Make a note of your final impressions about the target. Then write down the time, finish your session, and write a few sentence summary of what you perceived. Look over everything your wrote down as you might have forgotten about it by now.
When you’re ready, pull out the top photo from the envelope and see how you did! This is called “getting your feedback.” You might surprise yourself with how much you got right. Take your time to really look at the colors, shapes, and other descriptors. You might see aspects of the target that are apparent in your session only after some careful inspection of everything wrote down. But if you didn’t get anything in the photo, don’t despair. The main point of RV is to learn about yourself, not just to be accurate. It can take some time before you make a big breakthrough. But when it happens, it might just come as a shock to you that it works. And don’t overdo it either, you want this to stay fun to get the best results in the long run.
Around fifteen years ago I was lucky enough to take some seminars with the late Beverly Jaegers of the U.S. PSI Squad who often helped law enforcement all over the United States in hundreds of missing persons cases. They had a success rate somewhere near eighty percent but never took any credit for helping. Beverly, author of the hands on “how to” book The Psychic Paradigm, was a highly talented, self-taught psychic whom you might have seen on TV. She excelled at Psychometry, or detecting non-local information merely by touching an object associated with it.
One time, when I was working on a practice target at a seminar with her, she came over to me and asked me what I was perceiving about the target. It was a description of a vehicle but I hadn’t written it down: Beverly told me write it down and then said to me in a loud voice: “Don’t second guess yourself!” My description turned out to be a very accurate one of the suspect’s vehicle in the arson case she had given us. All we had been allowed to do at the beginning of the session was touch the outside of an envelope containing some physical evidence.
DETACH FROM THE OUTCOME
Another beautiful paradox of the RV process is that the more you’re detached from the outcome of the session, the better you’ll do. In other words, if you just do the session for the fun of it or for the challenge of describing your perceptions as thoroughly and accurately as possible, your session will be more accurate than if you’re worried whether your data are right or not.
Growing up in the educational systems that most of us did, we’re concerned with being right and defending our ideas with facts. But you can’t do that during RV, so you just have to let go and do your best. Because as long as you’re attempting to use our “senseless” senses you’ll be making progress. You’re accessing a new communications systems that may have been dormant for quite a while, so be patient with yourself.
Resist the urge to feel excited if you make good target contact or dejected if you miss. The point is get in touch your internal communication systems and get better at decoding it. You can’t learn this overnight just like you can’t learn to play a musical instrument without lots of practice. But if you persist through your viewing sessions, no matter what the outcome, some amazing experiences await you. Everyone is different, so you’ll have to let me know how this process affects your personal, cognitive, and spiritual development. But for most people I know, eventually something profound happens and you just feel expanded and more in touch with what’s going on inside and around you.
One book I can highly recommend is Explorers of the Infinite: The Secret Lives of Extreme Athletes by Maria Coffey. It’s not about RV per se, but more about the spontaneous awareness and intuitive flashes of insight that come to people, or those close to them, involved in extreme sports and adventure activities. It’s uncanny how people participating in difficult, challenging situations tap deeply into their intuitions and get precognitive information about what they’re about to encounter on a climb to a mountain top or deep in the wilderness. It shows us that these abilities are built into us yet they need some coaxing to be fully activated.
It’s really important to remember that you are already as psychic as you need to be.You don’t need to be more psychic than you already are but you can learn to be more mindful and attentive at every moment. Being psychic also means being more sensitive and that comes with a price. If you become too sensitive to your environment or perceptions, you may feel overwhelmed. Many natural psychics suffer from health issues. Others only attained their highly-accurate abilities after a major accident or traumatic event. So you don’t need to be more psychic: the point of RV practice is be a more integrated, perceptive and balanced, not to be able to predict tomorrow’s lottery numbers, unless that’s really your highest joy.
Highly-accurate, natural psychics are extremely rare. However, everyone has this ability to some degree or another, so it’s worth practicing just to surprise yourself and find out more about who you are. And to show yourself some incontrovertible evidence that some part of you is, in some hidden way, intrinsically connected to everything else in the universe.