ESP and “psychic” abilities have had a bad reputation among most scientists.   A major reason for this attitude is that the evidence for psychic abilities has been considered anecdotal since it has not been reliably repeatable and, as a consequence, not testable with scientific methodology.  This has been a reasonable criticism.  Until recently.

In a variation of psychic performance given the name “Remote Viewing,” sophisticated research protocols have been used to successfully demonstrate these abilities in a highly reproducible way.  This eliminates the basis for this criticism and allows conventional scientific evaluation of the process.  This article will briefly discuss this research and its logical conclusions.

As some readers of this blog are aware, I am writing a book about the implications of these kinds of scientific research results.   For the convenience of interested readers who want to explore this topic in more depth, I am making the rough draft of my book chapter that covers the remote viewing, including references, easily available.  It can be located in the blog header under the name: Remote Viewing book chapter.

I will summarize here what is contained in that chapter.   The Remote Viewing protocol starts by requiring the complete isolation of the research subject to be tested from any possible source of information from outside the room where the subject is located.  The subject is then directed to give his or her impressions of an unknown location that a target team selects and visits.  The subject has no way of knowing what target the team visits.  The subject’s impressions of the target are then compared to the pictures of the actual target by judges who have had no contact with either the target or the research subject.  The results of the independent judges’ decisions about how well the impressions match the actual target are statistically analyzed to accurately estimate whether the results were obtained by chance.

From the large data base gathered with this meticulous protocol, it is proven beyond any reasonable doubt that research subjects can gather accurate information from distant unknown targets without any possible physical source of that information.  That is why I subtitled this article using the phrase “Perceiving Beyond the Five Senses.”  Information is somehow gathered from distant target sites without any physical mechanisms being involved and without the use of the five human senses we all use to gather information about the physical world.  This protocol produces results that are reproducible and involve average subjects that have no known psychic skills.  The results have also been replicated by independent research teams and meet the highest standards of scientific research quality.  They are completely reliable and they inform us about abilities each one of us possesses. 

In the double-slit physics experiments we saw that there is some sort of automatic, nonphysical connection between inanimate matter particles.  Here we see a similar nonphysical connection, but instead of being automatic, it is controlled by the individual’s deliberate conscious intent.   When I describe the mechanism as nonphysical, I mean it has the same extraordinary characteristics the physics experiments demonstrate.  Distance makes no difference in the accuracy of the process since the procedure is just as effective over thousands of miles of separation as it as at one hundred feet.  Our usual laws of causality and time are also violated since remote viewing is just as effective directed toward past and future events as it is when directed toward those happening at the same time that the viewer gathers the impressions.   The characteristics of the two sources of anomalous research results, the double slit experiments and remote viewing, are eerily similar.  This similarity cannot be an accident, it is telling us that these are real results about how our world operates.

From these results, we find that there are clearly two different kinds of action important in understanding how events in our world unfold, a physical kind and a nonphysical kind.  Each of these two domains operates by its own, unique set of rules.  We also learn from remote viewing that the human mind is our point of access to these nonphysical connections within the physical world.  I am sure that most of us have been completely unaware that we can access this ability.  This should not be a surprise, though, since the effects are quite subtle and require powerful statistical analytic techniques to demonstrate they even exist in most subjects. 

Can we learn to make practical use of these abilities?  It is clear that some people are already adept at them, but the practical potential seems to pale beside the importance of what these abilities tell us about the nature of who we are.  We are not just physical organisms in touch with only the physical environment immediately surrounding us.  Who we are extends out beyond our body to gather information virtually anywhere, unlimited by time and distance constraints.  Thus, there is an aspect of who we are that completely transcends the physical.

In the next article of this series, we will see more superbly designed research, this time showing how people can actually change distant events solely through their mental intent to do so.