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Remote Viewing Training, Part One: The Initial Phases, with Paul H. Smith
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[Music]
Thinking Allowed. Conversations on the leading edge of
knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.
Hello and welcome, I'm Jeffrey Mishlove.
This is part one of our two-part series on training remote viewing.
With me is Dr. Paul Smith, a philosopher,
former Army Intelligence Officer, a participant
in the Army's remote viewing program for seven years.
He is the author of The Essential Guide to Remote Viewing and also Reading the Enemy's
Mind.
In addition, he is the President and Chief
Trainer of Remote Viewing Instructional Services.
Welcome Paul.
I'm glad to be here, Jeff.
This is a great opportunity.
It's a pleasure to be with you.
You've been involved professionally in remote viewing now for a few decades.
You received your original training as part of the Army's remote viewing program, which
was a top secret program at the time.
You received your training from Ingo Swan, who was, I guess it's fair to say, probably
if any one person would be acknowledged as the originator of remote viewing, it would
be Ingo.
When you received your training, you had no experience in any aspect of parapsychology
or clairvoyance or psychic functioning or remote viewing or anything akin to it.
Is that correct?
That's absolutely correct.
First of all, I'd never heard of remote viewing.
While I had heard of ESP, I was a bit skeptical
about it, mainly because I'd been involved
in an ESP science fair project in junior high
that had totally tanked and had no success
at all.
I'd showed no evidence of being psychic whatsoever.
I'd pretty much given up on the idea of ESP being a reality.
When they approached me with it, it was just a massive surprise to me.
They obviously intuited that there was something
about you that would fit in the remote viewing
program.
Actually, they actually had a checklist they
were going through to evaluate people who
they thought might be good.
One of the things they didn't want was someone
who was already professed to be psychic.
I think part was they were afraid, and actually
from experience, frequently those people had
something to unlearn before they could actually
learn the new approach that was being applied.
Essentially, what they were looking for was
you had to be a military intelligence officer.
That was the first requirement.
The expectation was you'd be above average in intelligence, which I wasn't unique in
that.
Everybody in the intelligence, well, not everybody
in the intelligence corps generally would
meet that.
You had to be accomplished in your career.
You had to have gone through all the little wickets that you have to go through to be
a competent intelligence officer.
Plus, they were looking for someone who was involved in some kind of creative pursuit
that is fairly atypical in a military setting.
Someone who's involved in studio art of some
kind, music, maybe creative writing, languages
counted as well because that uses a different
part of your brain, obviously, than your native
language.
All those things are looking for someone who had one or another of those.
I had all four of them, I'd majored in art in college.
I'd been playing guitar for 20, 30 years by then.
I was fluent in German and studied two other
languages, and I like to submit short stories
and get rejected all the time.
They basically assumed that a person with
those qualifications could succeed as a remote
viewer.
I think their assumption was that increased the odds you'd be successful.
It didn't guarantee it, but it increased the odds that you'd be good at it.
At some point along the way, I guess you were
shocked to understand that you were going
to become part of a secret project involving clairvoyant abilities.
What they did was they gave me a bunch of
psychology tests, many of which you're probably
familiar with.
I scored within the parameters they were looking
for, and so they took me over to the offices
and they sat me down and they read me on and
essentially give you a non-disclosure statement.
Then they said, we collect intelligence against
foreign threats using a parapsychology discipline
known as remote viewing.
We essentially want you to volunteer to be a psychic spy.
My brain is going, what?
It did this whole calculus.
The government invited me to volunteer for a program in which they trained people to
be psychic, and they're obviously spending quite a bit of money on this.
That must mean it works.
There's no way I'm not going to do this, so I immediately volunteered.
Then they put you through the training program.
I am presuming, and correct me if I'm wrong,
that the training that you now offer to people
through the various workshops that you do is
essentially based on the training you yourself
receive.
Yes, it was interesting.
Of course, we're talking now 30, almost 40
years ago, well, not quite, somewhere in there.
1984 is when my training started with Ingo and Hal.
That was so effective that I continued to
try and stay as close to that model as I can.
Obviously, nothing stays static because we learn more things in between.
Anytime I found something that was legitimate
that would augment or enhance the process,
I'd introduce that.
I had to make sure that I felt confident that
it really was an improvement to the system.
In general, it's almost identical to how I learned.
I know in your book, Reading the Enemy's Mind,
you describe in great detail what it was like
on the inside of that program, including going through the training.
You describe six different stages that the training process took.
This was, at that time, as I recall, over a period of years.
Yes.
The way they came up with the program, this training approach, when they first started
remote viewing at SRI, which is where it really
got its legs, also known as the Stanford Research
Institute, or SRI International, when they
first started that out, they essentially relied
on people who just had native capacity.
We all have native capacity, but these people
had learned how to leverage that, learned
how to discipline it to be successful.
Ingo Swann himself started off that way.
He had this native faculty and he learned to explore it and learned to use it.
I think it's fair to say that Ingo Swann went
through some extensive training as a Scientologist
and that that was instrumental, I think, in his development.
It's interesting.
There's probably truth to that.
I've actually asked Ingo that question.
He denies that Scientology had much, if anything,
to do with how he developed remote viewing,
but from what I understand of Scientology,
there is a certain aspect to it that certainly
would cultivate your so-called psychic powers or your ability to perform ESP.
Scientology claims as much.
Yes.
To my recollection, Ingo was what they call a clear in Scientology, pretty far along in
the Scientology program.
Yes.
Ironically, he fell out of sorts with them and he became a prominent member of their
blacklist because he went around actually preaching against Scientology.
He was very discouraged with his experience there.
But I can't deny that it wouldn't surprise me
if he developed some of his insights, certainly,
and abilities perhaps from there.
But he rejects the idea that remote viewing
itself came from any element of Scientology.
I think he wants to be acknowledged for his own unique contributions, which is fair.
It's fair.
And one of the really great things about Ingo
was that he was quick to acknowledge other
people's involvement.
For example, the precursors to remote viewing
include like Rene Walcolye, who was a French
researcher who engaged in experiments of clairvoyance,
very much akin to the remote viewing protocols
used today.
And Ingo really respected him, Walcolye, Upton
Sinclair, who was, of course, a novelist who
was not famous for psychic behavior, but published a book called Mental Radio.
He was a very popular novelist back in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, as I recall.
His wife was clairvoyant.
She was.
And the book Mental Radio was based on experiments he did with her.
And he was actually quite conscientious for a non-scientist.
He was very careful to respect what we would
consider scientific conventions in conducting
that research.
If I'm correct, Albert Einstein even wrote an introduction to one of the editions of
that book.
Yes.
There's a long history of research into what
parapsychologists call free-response ESP, as
opposed to forced-choice ESP, like card guessing.
And remote viewing would be categorized by
parapsychologists as a kind of ESP test where
you can make any sort of response that pops
into your head that then gets matched against
a target.
It's much more free-form than dice roll,
card guessing, all of those more restrictive,
but very high statistical generating kind of
approaches, which, in a way, makes it more
fun to do.
In fact, I think that's one of the attractions
of remote viewing, is that the world, the
entire world, is full of targets that you can address.
And it's a lot harder to get bored in remote
viewing than it is in some of these other
approaches.
Well, the interesting thing about your personal
story here is that you're an army intelligence
officer with no particular inclination toward
the paranormal, but they put you through this
training program, and you've discovered that
you can succeed at it to the extent where
here we are now three, four decades later, and you're still doing this work.
Yes.
I mean, my first experience with remote viewing was a game changer for me.
I won't say it completely changed my view of the world, but it certainly expanded it
dramatically.
And then every subsequent experience where I
succeeded, the failures always kind of pull
you back a little bit, and everybody fails.
That's one thing you have to realize about remote viewing is nobody is 100% on this.
And every failure is a little bit of setback,
but the upside of a failure is that you learn
more from a failure than you do from a success.
I tend to think of it sort of like in baseball,
where a really good baseball player might
have a 300 batting average, which means that
only three times out of ten do they actually
get a hit.
And fortunately, remote viewing, if you're really conscientious about how you approach
it, your batting average is a bit higher than that in many, if not most cases.
Well, let's talk about the training that you went through.
The first stage, as I understand it, involves
seeing the target as a gestalt, as a whole.
Yes, a little background to that.
The six-stage process that Ingo and Hal put
off developed is actually based on legitimate
perceptual research.
They didn't invent any of this approach.
What they did is observe how actual native
or natural remote viewers performed, combined
that with researchers being discovered about
how subliminal processes work in the brain,
the right brain and left brain dichotomy, and how they interact and don't interact.
What else did they do?
There's a lot of this background research that they incorporated into the process.
And so each of these stages is meant to kind
of match an insight that they gain from this.
So the first stage is you just get a kind of envelope, sort of an impression of the
target.
Now, you use the word seeing, and we call this remote viewing.
The problem is that it's much more than viewing and it's much more than seeing.
I prefer the term remote perception, which didn't originate with me.
But really, we owe that to Brenda Dunn and Romer John, who had the Paralab for a long
time.
Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory
at Princeton University Department of Engineering,
where they did extensive research.
Yes.
And I think they first initially used the remote perception terminology, which I find
better than remote viewing.
But remote viewing has got this now installed
base, so to speak, where everybody who's
involved in it recognizes that term and uses it.
But the experience is much more than visual.
Let's talk about the process.
What were you asked to do initially?
So you start off with basic lecture to give the principles, and then when you actually
get in the room to do your first remote viewing,
we call it controlled remote viewing, call
it that today, you have your first experience in this form of remote viewing.
Essentially, you get put in an environment
where you have to be psychic in order to get
anything, right?
So you get a target, they at that time to
designate what the target is, they would give
us coordinates, geographic coordinates, latitude
and longitude, and it could be anywhere in
the world.
So we had no real hope of figuring it out just from the coordinates.
But you had no idea what the target was.
You had to be completely blind to the target.
You couldn't have it.
And there's two reasons for that.
One, of course, is the skeptics would all
claim you were cheating if you knew what the
target was.
But that's an irrelevant reason.
Because the real reason is, if you know what
the target is, you have a really hard time
of getting the subtle signal that comes in.
If you know what the target is, then everything
you know about it, everything you can guess
about it, everything you can suppose about it and infer, all of that's right there in
your head.
Your intellect will sort of take over.
You're looking for, you use the term subtle
signal, and earlier you talked about subliminal
perception.
It's as if the mind at an almost subconscious
level is able to access information.
I actually talk about, in terms of being in this digital age, people understand this,
it's sort of a narrow bandwidth signal.
There's a very small amount of information throughput, particularly at the beginning,
and it competes with all this other stuff
that our minds and brains are processing and
doing.
So you've got this little subtle signal, and
you've got this massive overburden of what
we call mental noise, actually, which tends to blanket it out.
A major part of the training was learning to differentiate, distinguish between that
signal and everything else that's going on,
and be able to, like a combine gets the little
wheat kernels out of all that straw, that's
kind of what you have to learn to do in remote
viewings, to learn to essentially extract
the signal from that massive signal to noise
ratio that's going on.
So they would put us in the room, they'd
give us a little latitude and longitude, the
angle was usually, at that time, the one who
was conducting the training, and then you
had to sit there and go through the process
that you taught you and try and identify what,
as you correctly referred to, the gestalt of the target, essentially the thing-ness
of it.
Now you close your eyes at this point.
Actually, no, we weren't encouraged to close our eyes.
The interesting thing about closing your eyes
is it increases the alpha EEG level in your
brain, which is associated with mental
imagery, which is associated with mental noise.
And so, although I don't stop my students, for example, from closing their eyes when
we're doing a session, I encourage them not to.
And if you learn how to do it with your eyes
open, essentially, like if you're in a daydream,
oftentimes you'll daydream with your eyes
open, you don't see anything in front of you,
you just know what's going on up here, right?
You can function perfectly well with your eyes open, you don't really notice anything
going on around you, it's all, you know, you're focused on mental processing.
So it's really about your mental focus more than whether your eyes are open or closed.
It is.
The other advantage of having your eyes open
is you're supposed to record everything you
get on paper.
So you can't do that with your eyes closed, but.
Yeah.
So, and you were asked to sit there with a paper
and pencil and start jotting down impressions.
Yes.
Now, on the very first stage, what you do is,
first of all, there's interesting, there's
this thing we call an ideogram.
It's kind of like a seismograph for this signal, right?
If you have your pen on your paper as you
take the coordinate, when the signal impinges
on your system, whatever part of your system
impinges on, you tend to make a little squiggle
like this.
Yeah.
And you can learn things about the target from that squiggle.
Just from a little unconscious squiggle, you guess.
Yes.
Because it does tend to convey information.
And I'll tell you, this is, there's a little
hand waving going on here because we don't
understand the process fully, right?
But my view of this is, is your subconscious
or unconscious, whichever word you prefer,
picks up on the content of this target is essentially a, just an impact.
There's a lot of information all at once.
And that manifests itself in a kind of a
physical reaction, a physiological reaction.
And that, the information in very gross terms
comes through to your conscious mind to a
certain degree.
And you capture that using that ideogram that
will mark on the paper as kind of an anchor
point back to the information.
And so roughly, the only thing you're really
going to get of importance here is the basic
nature of the target.
And in fundamental terms, you can identify whether it's land or water or a structure
of some kind, a life form of some kind, you know, an event or an activity of some kind.
Those are kind of generally the basic things.
Big categories.
Big category kinds of things.
And that's what we refer to as a gestalt.
Yeah.
It's a, you can have all kinds of structures.
You have castles.
You can have McDonald's.
You can have houses.
You can have shopping centers.
There are all kinds of structures, right, but they all fit this kind of category of
structure.
So that's a gestalt.
They have a gestalt of structure.
Although Ingo actually insisted that we identify
as sub-gestalt, for example, as a castle.
If it's a castle, he wanted you to identify
as a castle, which is really quite impressive
when you do that regularly.
But what you're working with at that point,
you're getting little snatches of information,
little pictures, you may make drawings, little
hints of this or that, or sort of popping
into your mind.
Just pops in.
And particularly in this first stage, the
second stage is more of a sensory engagement.
Now, let me just stop you for one second because
even before you begin, isn't there some preparation
like where you ask your subconscious mind to cooperate in the process or something of
that sort?
A lot of viewers do that.
We call that, well, at Fort Meade, where this
was all done at Fort Meade, Maryland, we call
that cool-down, right?
You go in, you relax, you kind of get in a state of mind where you do it.
The early remote viewers like Helle Hammett always had to put on her lucky socks.
Pat Price, another early and quite successful
remote viewer, always had to take off his
glasses and clean them so he could see better,
even though he knew it wasn't really seeing
with his eyes.
That was a little ritual he felt like he needed to put him in place.
I listened to heavy metal music.
I'd lay down on a bed, plug in my earphones.
It wasn't all heavy metal.
It was some hard rock, even some kind.
I had Dolly Parton.
But it was some sort of a little ritual that
took you out of your normal, everyday state
where you got your mind, body, system all set
to say, now I'm going to do remote viewing.
The interesting thing is I've learned you don't need to do that.
In fact, when I'm teaching remote viewing, I don't allow my students to cool down.
I realize, I can realize it was a crutch.
As it is with me now, I have to do a cool-down
to improve my chances of having a successful
session.
But I've noticed that if I just put my students
there and say, here you go, here's your coordinate,
let's go, that they can do just as well, which is actually very useful to know.
That makes it just like any other human faculty.
We don't have to warm up to see things.
We don't have to get in touch with our inner
selves to be able to feel or smell or whatever.
Remote viewing is another faculty.
It's not another sense.
People say, well, this is extra sensory.
That means this is like your sixth sense or your seventh sense.
That's a misunderstanding of what extra sensory means.
Extra sensory means outside of your senses
because the information that comes in bypasses
your actual, the five senses, and there are several others, but bypasses all those and
seems to come directly into the perceptual centers of the brain and is processed as if
it were sensory data, but the senses don't actually mediate it.
It just comes and it just jumps right across there and right into your head.
We could have lengthy theoretical discussions as
to just how it happens, but you're a practical
person, an army intelligence officer, and
the military determined, at least during the
duration of the program, that it worked and that was enough.
Yes.
Well, that's how it works with the military.
If you have a problem and you have a solution,
you don't care why the solution works.
You just care that it works, which is why
it's such a kind of a surreal thing that was
the military that promoted this and stuck with it for so long.
Because it seems atypical of something the
military would engage in, and in fact it was
a little bit of a rough fit.
There were people in the military all along
who wanted to do away with it, and they would
often clash with the people who wanted to keep it.
So it's amazing the program survived for 20 years.
It is.
It is amazing.
There were times when it looked questionable, but it did.
Now, you were starting to talk about stage two.
Stage two is the next most advanced level in the process, and people should recognize
that all six of these stages happen generally in one remote viewing session.
So you start off with this very basic, nostalgic view of it.
The next stage is where you have sensory engagement.
Now, I just said that you bypass the senses,
but it does come in as if it were sensory
data.
So you get colors, you get what I call qualities
of light, like sparkly or shimmery or shadowy
or whatever.
Not through the external senses, but in your own mentally sensorium.
And I'll explain a little bit what that's like
here in a second, because that's an interesting
question.
How does that work?
So you get textures, you get tactile experiences,
temperature, you get tastes and smells and
sounds and kinesthetic impressions as well.
And people say, well, okay, well, how does that work?
How does that feel?
And I say, and what I usually say is, well,
in a way, it's like having a half-remembered
memory.
You know how you have a memory from the past
that's really vague, but it brings back old-time
memories, whatever.
But this is a memory you know doesn't come from you.
So it's got the quality of a half-remembered
memory, but it's one you identify as being
something that's new in your consciousness.
Very speaking, you can sometimes have very vivid experiences.
You may just get the channel just right, and
you'll have this very vivid flash of red.
You'll really have an almost visual experience
of bright red or whatever, and you know there's
red there.
Other times, you don't see anything at all, for example, or you don't hear anything at
all, but you just know that there's tinkling
sound here, like a bell, and you didn't hear
it, but you just know it's there.
And there's all these different levels of the perceptual experience, but it does come
in as perception in this particular stage.
So the idea in the military program and in
the work you do is that when people practice
over and over and over again, they begin to
get familiar with how their own mind processes
this information.
That's an important point in the whole training
process of remote viewing and, frankly, any
other human skill, right?
You can get the theory, you can get the principles,
they can teach you the format and all that,
but until you actually do it, you don't know how to do it, right?
They'll learn everything you know about riding
a bike, and you can know about riding a bike
until you get on the bike and you learn something different.
There's actually a famous philosophical thought
experiment trying to identify what consciousness
is like.
I forget the exact term, but Mary, the color
scientist, knows everything there is to know
about science, but there's never actually about color, rather, knows everything there
is to know about color, including the physics
of wavelength, the light, all that stuff,
but has never actually experienced color.
As soon as she experiences color, she's learned something new that she didn't know.
And that's the way it is with remote viewing.
You can learn all of the details of the principles
and process, but until you actually do it,
you don't know.
And so there's a little bit of, you could say, school learning, right?
Or a lot of school learning.
But there's also this experiential part, this essentially trial and error.
No matter how much you know, you still have to go through a trial and error period.
We can just shorten that up by teaching you the principles.
Paul Smith, thank you so much for being with me for this half hour.
You are quite welcome.
And thank you for being with us.
Remember to check your listings for part two
of this two-part series on training remote
viewing.
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