Limitless Mind. Russell Targ

awareness.

      The reward for embarking on a mind-quieting path is a profound feeling of personal freedom and spaciousness. You will recall that, 2,400 years ago, our friend Patanjali said that quieting the mind is the same as union with God. It still seems to be true today.

       CHAPTER TWO

       on a clear day we

       can see forever

       WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT REMOTE VIEWING

      Remote viewing is not a spiritual path, but such psychic functioning is a step in the direction of conscious awareness — nonlocal mind revealing itself for us to see.

      Over time, I have sat in a darkened interview room with hundreds of remote viewers as they shared their mental pictures with me. It is a fact that people can experience a mind-to-mind connection with each other. They can also expand their awareness to describe and experience what is happening in distant locations. Fifty years of published data from all over the world testify to this.

      In the fall of 1972, Dr. Hal Puthoff and I started a psychic research program at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). We were both laser physicists who had carried out research for a variety of U.S. government agencies for many years.¹ Our great partner and teacher in the SRI program was the New York artist and highly respected psychic Ingo Swann. Ingo introduced Hal and me — and the world — to remote viewing. Actually, the chain of events went like this: Ingo taught us about remote viewing, we taught the army, and the army taught the world.² The history of our program is described in several books, including Miracles of Mind.³

      At the time when we began our psi research program, Hal had already carried out a remarkable experiment with Ingo. In this trial, Ingo was able to psychically describe and affect the operation of a highly shielded superconducting magnetometer buried in the basement of the Stanford University physics building. (This gave rise to the first of many government inquiries into our activities.)

      As a result of this trial, Hal and I began to further investigate remote viewing, as any physicist would. We put a laser in a box and we asked Ingo to tell us whether it was on or off. We asked him to describe pictures that were sealed in opaque envelopes or hidden in a distant room. He did all these tasks excellently, but he found them boring. He eventually told us that if we didn’t give him something more interesting to do, he was going back to New York to resume his life as a painter. He said that if he wanted to see what was in an envelope, he would open it; to see into the next room, he would simply open the door. Since he could focus his attention anywhere in the world (as he told us more than once), these experiments were a trivialization of his ability! By the end of the decade, we’d given Ingo many opportunities to psychically view the world and beyond.

      By the beginning of 1974, Hal and I had carried out more than fifty formal remote viewing trials at SRI, most of which were low-key experiments with little publicity. However, in 1973 we carried out a series of experiments with the now-famous Israeli psychic Uri Geller that brought us a fair amount of notice. During the year when we worked with Uri, who demonstrated remarkable telepathic ability, our tiny program was responsible for more than half the publicity received by the $100-million SRI. We published our findings from the work with Uri in the distinguished British science journal Nature,⁴ and as a result the SRI psychic research activity gained worldwide attention.

      Figure 2. Russell Targ (left) and Hal Puthoff outside the Stanford Research Institute, 1977. Photo by Hella Hammid.

      Since the beginning of 1973, we also worked with Pat Price, a retired police commissioner from Burbank, California. Pat had telephoned Hal and asked if we’d be interested in working with him. He said that he had used his psychic ability all his life, in particular to catch criminals in his work as a police officer. Of course, we accepted his offer. Until 1979, when we met Joe McMoneagle, Pat was the most remarkable psychic we’d ever encountered — and he remains the only one able to read printed words at a distance. Pat was a cheerful, even-tempered man. A young secretary who was typing Pat’s descriptions of distant sites once asked him if he could psychically follow her into the ladies’ room. His reply was, “If I can focus my mind on any place on the planet, why would I follow you into the ladies’ room?” That was Pat! Figure 3 shows Pat Price on the job.

      Figure 3. Retired police commissioner and psychic Pat Price, the only person we know who can psychically read words. Photo by Hella Hammid.

       FOUR AREAS OF REMOTE VIEWING APPLICATIONS

      Once we learn how to perform remote viewing techniques (which you can do in Chapter 3), how might this process be applied? Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, in his capacity as Director of the Intuition Network,⁵ proposed four broad areas of remote viewing applications: evaluation, location, diagnosis, and forecasting.

       Evaluation

      Evaluation might include weighing various alternatives, such as an investment or choices of technology or building sites. Evaluation often includes a mixture of psychic ability and nonpsychic intuition. I believe that intuition comprises the sum total of everything one has learned or experienced in the course of one’s life and stored in one’s subconscious mind; this background then works together with information that comes to one psychically. For example, when I was leaving SRI in 1982, I wondered where I would work next; the employment agency told me that I had destroyed a promising career in lasers by spending ten years doing ESP research. I sat in my office and visualized what my new place of employment would look like. An image of the nearby foothills led me to make inquiries of my friends who worked in the Lock-heed Missiles & Space research laboratory. (They were happy to have me return to my laser roots — if I promised not to get them into ESP research.) I believe that a combination of my psychic ability (the information that a job would open up for me at Lockheed) and my intuition (recognition of the foothills and knowing people at Lockheed) helped this image of my possibilities come together.

       Location

      Remote viewing has been used to find many things of value, including oil or mineral deposits, hidden treasure, and missing people — all of which have been objects of fascination for as long as people have tried to span space with their thoughts. The following story illustrates our experience with this application.

       The Kidnapping of Patricia Hearst

      On the night of Monday, February 4, 1974, a group of American terrorists kidnapped nineteen-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst from her apartment near the University of California at Berkeley, where she was a student. The kidnappers identified themselves as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). They were radical anarchists whose slogan was “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.” The conservative, wealthy Hearst family was a perfect target for them. While the press was trying to find “Symbia” on the map, the Berkeley Police Department was trying to locate the daughter of one of the most prominent celebrities in San Francisco — namely the publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, and president of the nationwide Hearst newspaper syndicate.

      The day after the kidnapping, the police remained clueless. It was such a desperate situation that the Berkeley Police Department was moved to think about asking for psychic guidance. They called the president of SRI on Tuesday afternoon, and our laboratory director asked us if we thought remote viewing could help. Pat Price said that he had often worked on this kind of problem. So we all piled into Hal’s car and drove to Berkeley to meet with the detectives on the case and visit the scene of the