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Remote Viewing Training, Part Two: The Advanced Phases, with Paul H. Smith
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Thinking Allowed. Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge
and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.
Hello and welcome, I'm Jeff Mishlove.
This is part two of our two-part series on training remote viewing with Dr. Paul Smith
who is a founder and past president of the International Remote Viewing Association.
Paul participated in the military remote viewing program for seven years.
He's a former army intelligence officer as well as a philosopher and is the author of
Reading the Enemy's Mind and the Essential Guide to Remote Viewing.
Welcome again, Paul.
Thank you.
It's a pleasure to be with you.
In the first part of our two-part series, we
talked about a lot of things, but essentially
we covered stages one and stage two of the remote viewing training process.
It's a six-stage program that you went through over a period of many years.
I'm under the impression that these days the training has become accelerated.
It doesn't need to take many years the way it once did.
Right.
In fact, it probably didn't need to take many years back then.
Many as in well, actually many months is probably a better term.
Of the six-stage process, it took us a full
year to get through the first three with Ingo
Swan.
There was a number of reasons for that.
One was that we just had a lot of administrative,
military administrative issues going on.
There's some questions about the survival of the program.
We had a lot of dealings with general officers
and stuff we had to worry about and so we
had gaps in our training.
But the other process, part of it, was that
Ingo had this philosophy, legitimate it turns
out, that you needed to have spaced learning.
You needed to have an intense learning experience
and then back off and do something else for
a while.
Give yourself time to digest, absorb, assimilate everything.
Exactly.
In fact, those were the terms we used.
Assimilate was a big one for him.
You were assimilating what you were learning, experiencing.
The only thing is that this was very early
in the process and so he didn't know how long
that absorption process had to last.
It wasn't unusual for you to go in to do some
training, do a session in the morning, do
really well on that session and Ingo would tell you not to come back for the rest of
the day because you weren't going to assimilate that experience.
He also wanted you to leave feeling confident and successful.
Quit on a high was another of his mantras.
Essentially, you quit on a high.
You can fail 15 times but as soon as you got
that one hit, then he wanted you to stop there.
I think he got this idea from sports training
which was exploring the same idea at the time.
It turns out to be very legitimate.
In fact, his idea of spaced learning really
just in the last maybe decade has become very
popular in foreign language training and some
of these other, and music training as well
where you instead of spend hours and hours and hours doing this rope process over and
over again, you spend a short amount of time
working on whatever skill it is, relatively
short amount of time, say 15 minutes or whatever or 20 minutes.
Then you go away and do something else and then you come back and do another 15 or 20
minutes.
You go away and do something else.
It's been shown that you retain what you've learned of that skill significantly better
if you do the spaced learning than if you
have done the old rote, blunt instrument kind
of approach to it.
Well, is it your belief that remote viewing is a skill akin to language or music that
can be trained in much the same way?
It's absolutely the same in that respect.
I know not everybody thinks so.
Yes.
There are people who argue that this is just something you can do or you can't.
But like language, we all have the innate ability to speak a language.
But when we're born, we don't.
We have to learn to speak whatever our native
tongue is, but we can only learn to do that
because we already have the ability born into us.
They say when you're training animals to do tricks, that you can't train an animal to
do a trick that doesn't have some antecedent
in its normal behavioral patterns.
The same thing is true with this.
The SRI research, Stanford Research Institute
Research, showed that there's a very widespread
ability in the population, probably universal
or as close to universal as you can get.
Because we're talking about the nature of human consciousness, ultimately.
And all humans have consciousness of some kind, right?
Right.
Exactly.
But the thing is that you have the raw material,
you don't necessarily then have the skill
to take advantage of that raw material.
And so that's what remote viewing is, what we're doing with remote viewing training.
Now the kind of training that we're talking
about here, the six stage processes, is formally
known as controlled remote viewing.
There's other varieties, and I talk about generic remote viewing for want of a better
term because no other term has been coined for it.
And that's the folks who just kind of learn it trial and error.
They just sort of learn it on their own.
And you can learn remote viewing that way.
I mean, the earlier remote viewers, that's how they learned it.
But this is more of a codified, structured approach that seems to help people learn it
more quickly and more consistently than just
the old trial and error kind of a thing.
Well, you sometimes hear the phrase military
grade remote viewing as if it implies, well,
something very serious in terms of its purpose and the desired results.
Yes.
We like to joke military grade was provided by the lowest bidder, right?
But there's also mil-spec, military specifications,
and in some degree that does convey quality
because when you talk about, for example, mil-spec weapons, they've got to function.
They absolutely have to function.
And so to some degree, military grade can indicate that there's an advantage there,
that there's something valuable.
And of course, the blessing of all of this, the way the program ended and all that, is
that now the whole civilian world can have access to that military grade approach to
consciousness, applied consciousness essentially.
Well, and that's what you do.
You train that based on the training you've been through.
It might be worth mentioning right now, how
you would distinguish between a remote viewer
and a psychic.
Just a little bit of, it's almost like trying
to tell where red and purple are differentiated
on the color spectrum, right?
It just sort of becomes red or sort of becomes
purple and there's no clear distinction.
But generally speaking, I guess you could say a remote viewer is someone who has an
actual studied technique and the core of the
technique is distinguishing mental noise from
the signal.
What really is kind of the foundational element
of the remote viewing process that Ingo Swann
and Hal Puthoff developed, and it's fairly
typical of even the whole remote viewing program
at SRI, is that the recognition that there
is this issue of mental noise, most, I don't
use this term pejorative, there will be almost garden
variety psychics, people who just spontaneously
started being psychic or had their own little approach to how to learn that.
Most of those folks, particularly earlier
before remote viewing came on the scene, didn't
really recognize the distinction between mental noise and signal.
And so that's why you often find psychics being relatively unreliable.
Sometimes they do a really dynamite job, other
times they'd be completely out of the ballpark,
and they themselves probably didn't really know why or how that happened.
And I'm seeing these generalities here, obviously there's exceptions to this.
Because remote viewers have some of the same issues.
They do, but at least they recognize that this mental noise thing is the contributor,
and we understand somewhat the cause of it, and we also understand somewhat how you can
deal with it.
Now not all remote viewers learn it properly,
and so some of these remote viewers learn
it through osmosis, if you will, or whatever
it means, and don't have a formal approach
to it.
And they sort of vaguely have this idea of
mental noise, but they really don't know how
to deal with it.
And so you'll find them having many of the same issues as a standard psychic might.
And I want to add here that there are psychics who actually figure this out.
And those folks are actually, can be very good.
I would have distinguished between a remote viewer and a psychic this way.
I would say remote viewers are always looking
at physical targets that can be verified.
And principle can be verified, whereas many psychics are looking at non-physical things
and reporting where there's no opportunity for clear verification of its past lives,
spirit guides, the nature of your aura, things of that sort.
Those are all metaphysical entities.
That can be a distinction, but I would say
that's only between some psychics and remote
viewers, because there are some psychics who are very much more grounded.
There are some who specialize in law enforcement work.
Yes, exactly.
And there are remote viewers who do the same.
So there are remote viewers who get into esoteric.
So one very popular thing early on, partly due
to who, that some of the people who introduced
remote viewing to the public, they were also interested in UFOs.
And so they want to use remote viewing to explore UFOs.
I like to joke that you're using one mystery to explore another.
It's not a joke.
I think it's one of the tragedies.
And many of our viewers are probably thinking
right now, well, if the program was so successful,
why did the military drop it, assuming that they have?
I assume they have.
Do you?
Yes, pretty much.
I say there's a 90% chance that the military is not doing it.
Yeah.
10% chance that they might be, right?
Or not just military, but the intelligence.
My best guess, and I could be wrong, you probably
know much better than I, is that the effort
to use one mystery to solve another, as you put it, was the death knell of the program.
Well, no, there were actually other reasons,
because that really didn't become very prominent
until after immersion of the civilian world.
But you can see the undeniable attraction of
one who uses to try and resolve some of these
other mysteries, like xenobiology, I guess it's cryptozoology, is what they call it,
right?
Cryptozoology of UFOs, that kind of thing, is because other means aren't satisfactory
or not producing satisfactory results.
Well, let's use this that seems to be unhampered
by the same limitations of other information
developing means.
The problem is that we get into then the psychic realm, right?
Because then you're going against targets, missions, assignments, whatever, that you
can't verify.
You can develop this information.
But because a certain percentage of remote
viewings, no matter what, have a bit of fantasy
in them, you can't know whether this result you've come up with is fantasy or whether
it's real, because you can't verify it.
I tend to say, I call these esoteric targets or
anomaly targets, I can use those interchangeably.
And I recommend other people stay away from it.
I myself try and stay away from it, although
I haven't been completely successful, because
a remote viewer has to be blind to the target.
If you have a task that's absolutely determined
to get you to do a UFO target, you may end
up doing one even without wanting to.
So, typically these days, I gather, instead of giving you map coordinates, you might be
just given a number and say, this is target number 1735, describe it.
Yes, you do something along those lines.
I like to use the example of 8675, how's it go, 8675309, which is actually the name of
the song title.
Yes, I recall that song, yeah.
But essentially, we have a number we attach to the intent of the task.
So for example, if the, let's say it's a training
session, and the Eiffel Tower, the task or
the teacher wants you to remote view the Eiffel
Tower, they're not going to tell you to remote
view the Eiffel Tower, because you get all that mental noise, right?
So they'll give you 8675309, and that they have independently attached to the intent
to describe the Eiffel Tower.
There's an envelope somewhere with that number
on it, and inside the sealed envelope is...
A picture of the Eiffel Tower or something, yeah.
So I like to say a remote viewer has to be psychic in two different ways, right?
The first one is the obvious one, they have to actually develop information about the
target to which they have no sensory or technical connection.
The other way is they have to find out what the target is in the first place.
So there's speculation here, but maybe there's
an element of telepathy there, that they're
picking up from the task or what it is that they're supposed to do, or...
Well, some remote viewing deliberately puts
an element of telepathy into it, if you have
an outbound experimenter who's there at the target during the experiment.
There's a potential for telepathy, but the way an outbounder experiment is designed,
its goal is to avoid telepathy and focus on
the clairvoyant aspects of the remote viewing.
So for example, well, exactly, we also call
them not just outbounder, but beacon experiment,
so it's an alternative name.
What you're doing is using that person to pinpoint the target, and then what you're
doing is you're homing in on the person with
your conscious perception, and then you're
using that just as a way of accessing it
consciously, and then you explore the target.
And there's reasons to believe that that's
what was going on, because oftentimes remote
viewers would report on things that the people
at the target had no awareness of and could
not have had awareness of.
And so, at the very least, if there was telepathy
going on, that part couldn't have been telepathy.
Right.
Okay.
Well, and there's no way to rule out various
psychic gifts that might be contributing.
It could be precognition, retro cognition,
telepathy, clairvoyance, out-of-body experience.
All of those things might be part of the process
for all we know, which is actually why a lot
of folks now kind of try and avoid all of
that talk, and you get Ed May, who will talk
about, let's see, anomalous cognition.
Ed May being another researcher who was involved
at SRI and later on at another research institute
that actively, you receive government funding for remote viewing.
You get other folks like Russell Tard, who is one of the SRI researchers, and Stephen
Schwartz, who is kind of an independent researcher.
Both of them like to use the term non-local perception.
And at least you're not committing yourself to something that you can't actually know
for sure which way it goes by doing that.
It's kind of like the term SRI itself, the PSI, you know.
Well, I think, sure, scientists want to be free from theoretical baggage.
I think also from some of the controversies that
surround older words, psychic, clairvoyance.
People are ready for mental pictures that are not always positive.
And even if they were positive, they may not be right.
So that's always an issue.
You always have baggage with terminology.
Well, let's talk a little bit about stage three.
Yes.
So once you've had the sensory connection that you get in stage two, you describe the
target and sensory terms, you start kind of
getting a feel for the dimensionality of the
target, how it is in physical space.
Is it tall?
Is it wide?
Is it dense?
Is it hollow?
Those kinds of ideas.
When you merge into stage three, you
actually start making sketches of the target.
So here's where this kinesthetic sense, in a way, comes in.
Because I like to talk about sketching as your right brain bypassing your left brain,
which does all this analysis and interpretation,
and talking directly to your hand.
Because in a way, you've heard of automatic writing.
In remote viewing, quite frequently, the sketching
experience is kind of like automatic sketching,
where you start moving your pen around, and you're feeling where the lines ought to go,
but you don't know consciously why you're putting those lines there.
Now, that's not always the case.
Sometimes you do have a kind of a concept of
what the thing looks like, and you're sketching
that.
But oftentimes, you'll be going along and saying, no, that's not right.
That's got to go over here like this, or whatever.
You don't have any conscious reason why you do that.
But you just have this inner experience
that says, something's not quite right here.
I've got to adjust the sketch in this way.
So in stage three, you're trying to represent
the target or some aspect of the target.
Sometimes you get the whole thing.
I've done some remote viewing sessions where
it's just a remarkable depiction of the target,
as have other viewers.
Yes.
Joe McMonigle is famous.
He's, of course, one of the early remote viewers
as well, who just has an astonishing success
right now.
Very detailed drawings that turn out to be accurate.
Yes.
He's really good.
But it may be the entire thing.
Sometimes you get a sketch.
You're just part of it.
So for example, with the Eiffel Tower, you might draw a representation of the entire
tower.
But you also might just get some crisscrossing
elements, because that's what comes through
to you most prominently.
So then we move on to stage four.
Of course, this is where people often think about the more like being psychic, because
in this stage, you get what technically we
call abstract and concrete complex terminology.
So for example, again, I use the Eiffel Tower
as an example because I don't have it in my
target base.
I will never have a student that gets the Eiffel Tower from me so that they can't sit
there and think, well, when is he going to give me the Eiffel Tower?
So if the target is the Eiffel Tower, in
stage one, you'd identify it as a structure.
And in stage two, you'd say it's tall, black,
metallic, cold, rusty, food smells, whatever.
In stage three, you do a general sketch of it.
In stage four, you start perceiving things like tourism, national pride, foreign.
You might even get French, monumental, park-like setting.
People come here to visit.
The ambiance.
The ambiance, yeah, you get ambiance, and but also factual stuff as well.
But these are more detailed, more abstract concepts.
And you can build up then now a really kind of substantive idea about what this place
is.
You might name it Eiffel Tower, but generally
speaking, you're unlikely to do that because
you're getting a descriptive concept of it.
You get all that down, and essentially that
stage four is getting this more detailed kind
of abstract information.
The idea is to do that by reporting your raw
impressions as much as possible and avoiding
analytical overlay.
Yes.
Analytical overlay being the left brain interpretation of inadequate information.
We've all had that experience where we have bits of information about something and we
jump to a conclusion about it and it turns out we're wrong.
That's a major component of mental noise is
our left brain, whose job it is to interpret
information that comes in, operating on it in such a way that it gives you the wrong
answer.
It happens all the time.
It even happens in real life.
I like to use these remote viewing metaphors, right?
We have all kinds of analytical overlay in everyday life.
Indeed we do.
So I guess let's talk now about stage five.
Stage five is interesting in that it actually
isn't what we say is not on signal line.
You're actually technically not being psychic
in stage five without getting too complicated
the point of stage five is actually mind data
that has been dumped into your unconscious
or subconscious, however you want to call that, that's there, sorry, resident there,
but hasn't yet popped up in the conscious as
you go and you can extract that information
and expand your understanding of what this target is about.
But it's not an intellectual process.
It is, verges on it.
You have to be very careful with stage five
because you may start tempting the left brain
to jump into this.
And so you have to learn this process and be very careful about it or you're likely
to start generating more noise.
And you don't do it in every session that you do.
It's a tool essentially that you can employ if you get a concept in stage four that you
feel like there's more behind that concept.
So for example, let's say you say tourism in
stage four, get the impression of tourism.
Well you can go into stage five and what we call
stage five tourism, right, the word tourism,
and get things like cameras, visitors, Bermuda
shorts, sightseeing, you know, these kind
of things that all combine to cause you to
have the concept of tourism at more of a meta
level and you can get down and get the micro
details of why you said tourism in this stage.
So you're accumulating more and more information about the target at each stage.
So when you get to what essentially is a culmination
of this process, you can get into stage six
which if you're seeing closing counters of
the third kind where Richard Dreyfus is making
Devil's Tower out of mashed potatoes on his
dining room table, right, that's essentially
stage six.
In stage six you can make a three-dimensional model of the target.
Now the goal, the primary goal is to make the model.
The model is another tool to help develop more information about the target.
As you are engaged in this kinesthetic model
making process, the hope is that we'll free
up more information.
You're using clay, is that?
Well you can use mashed potatoes if you want,
but yeah, we generally used, at Fort Meade
we used modeling compound which is a form of clay.
I, in my classes I use Sculpey because it's
less messy than clay is, but I've since come
across this new material which I have to track
down that seems to be a little bit more malleable
and less messy.
You know, I'm always looking for a better product to do this with, right.
But in any case you're getting involved kinesthetically
when you're using your hands and you're feeling
it's bringing in other parts of your own body-mind nervous system.
And the kinesthetic process is actually a sensory process of sorts.
There works two ways, it can put information into
your system, but you can also bring information
out.
I mean if you think about it, long hand writing is a kinesthetic process, right.
It's both cognitively and kinesthetically connected.
Same thing with verbalizing.
There's kinesthetics involved in actually verbalizing words.
And in art, sketching and sculpting is a very
non-verbal kinesthetic information producing
process.
It can show people what you're feeling, what
you're experiencing by how you depict it through
your motor processes, you know, interaction with your muscles and such, which leaves a
record behind.
Well, we have a few minutes left, Paul.
We've described the six stages of the
classical controlled remote viewing training.
We've talked a bit about your past as a member
of the Military Intelligence Remote Viewing
Program.
Let me ask you in closing, what are your
thoughts about the future of remote viewing?
Well, I have two thoughts about it.
One is that it's virtually unlimited.
There's a lot of things you can do with remote
viewing that we can find out about it and
then we can actually do with it that we haven't even touched yet.
The other thought is that it's going to be
difficult to do that because we have a cultural
mindset that makes a lot of people resistant to this.
Now, there are obviously quite a few people who are interested in it and we reach out
to those folks.
And you yourself know, having been involved in parapsychology for many decades now, I
don't want to date you or anything.
But support for parapsychology research in the United States has declined dramatically
in recent years.
It's like mainstream science and the skeptical
community have succeeded in convincing everybody
that there's nothing to it and that somehow you get painted with this very nasty brush
if you're going to engage in it.
And so you don't get funding, laboratories won't touch it, which is very unfortunate
because the evidence is probably better than it's
ever been that this is a very real phenomenon.
Well, it's actually a group of phenomena, a very real set of phenomena that from any
other scientific perspective would be
immediately accepted by the scientific community.
But because of what it is, it gets rejected a
priori right out of the box because mainstream
science doesn't know what to do with it and feels threatened by it, frankly, I think is
what is happening.
Right.
We're not in a psi-friendly era, I suppose, although at the same time there's probably
more interest in remote viewing today than there was 30 years ago.
Yeah, 30 years ago hardly anybody ever knew it, even knew it existed.
And now it's almost still true if you look
at percentages, but still there are thousands
and thousands of people who now know about it.
Well, you've been a real pioneer in taking this work from the bowels of a top secret
military program to the general public.
Paul, it's been a pleasure sharing these two
interviews with you and I look forward to
having you come back to our studio and we'll have more conversations.
Thank you.
I'm excited about being able to do that.
Thank you so much for being with me.
You're welcome.
And thank you for being with us.
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