Limitless Mind. Russell Targ

in regard to perception, time, space, dimensionality, and possibility; we operate at higher frequencies within the electromagnetic spectrum of the light domain. This is because we are operating from the higher patterns themselves — what I am calling the archetypal domain. It is then, too, that our psychological makeup is less traumatized by past experience, is more capacious and capricious, and we feel extended into a multidimensional universe.

      Thus, among many other things, we are able to cause action at a distance. There have been millennia of observations of such phenomena. If prayer had not produced some positive results, religion would have been abandoned centuries ago. Ascribing such results to a supernatural agency rather than to nonlocality simply represents a different mode of description. Look at all the work that has been done in recent years to document the efficacy of prayer, particularly healing prayer. The results in most cases are very suggestive of nonlocal effects.

      Limitless Mind invites the reader to dwell in possibility. Russell Targ and his associates, especially his beloved daughter Elisabeth, bring certainty to what until recently was considered merely anecdotal. In so doing, they give us a universe that is larger than our aspirations and richer than all our dreams. For this we are very grateful.

      Jean Houston

       INTRODUCTION

       the unknowable

       end of the science

      Most people have the ability to describe and experience events and locations that are blocked from ordinary perception. Limitless Mind illustrates this perceptual ability by presenting decades of experiments in remote viewing, or remote perception of events. Such abilities have been demonstrated and documented in numerous U.S. and international laboratories, including the laboratory of Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in California, where a program of investigation began thirty years ago. However, despite repeated corroboration of our natural capacity for such psychic abilities, mainstream science has not accepted these abilities as real. How can this be?

      As one of the scientists who conducted the research at SRI, I do not have to believe in ESP. For decades, I have seen ESP occur in the laboratory on a day-to-day basis. As a physicist, I don’t have to believe in this phenomenon any more than I have to believe in the existence of lasers — with which I have also worked extensively. Psychic abilities exist, just as lasers do, as has been repeatedly demonstrated by hundreds of experimental research studies. What I believe in is good scientific data and replicated experiments, and those are what I describe in this book.

      There is a skeptical community that works tirelessly to “save” science from the depredations of frauds and charlatans. I applaud them, and I think they play a valuable role. In science, however, it is just as serious an error to ignore real but unpredictable data as it is to accept false data as true. For example, neglecting a small, fluctuating signal from an air turbulence detector can cause an airplane to crash — something that has actually happened.

      Naturally, none of us want to appear gullible, silly, or insane. We would often prefer to be wrong with the support of a group than to be correct all by ourselves. Offering scientific opinions contrary to the prevailing paradigm puts one in a similar position to such currently respected men as Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei, who suffered in their day for offering correct but unpopular scientific opinions about the earth’s motion. Commenting on this hazard, Voltaire wrote, “It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.”

      Similarly, many people today are reluctant to acknowledge the reality of psychic abilities, even though a 2001 Gallup poll stated that more than half the U.S. population reports having had psychic experiences. These believers include two-thirds of the college graduates and university professors queried. Such experiences, however, are strongly repressed in this society. Mainstream scientists usually declare them to be without credibility, and many organized religions declare them to be bad, or even evil.

      For millennia, philosophers have invited us to discover who we really are and what abilities we actually have, but we often feel afraid to do so because such exploration can be dangerous. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo were persecuted because they showed overwhelming evidence that we were not, in fact, special beings at the center of the universe, as everyone had been taught. Instead, we were (and are) inhabitants of one of several large rocks a hundred million miles from the sun, at the edge of the galaxy. People have always hated this idea. It was an attack on their egos — on who they thought they were. In the nineteenth century, when Charles Darwin demonstrated that we are also first cousins to monkeys and chimpanzees, it was a further assault on our pride!

      Another blow to our egos came not much later, when Sigmund Freud showed that much of what we believe and experience is governed by our subconscious, of which we are entirely unaware. The experience of psychic abilities further erodes the boundaries of the self by indicating that the psychic shell separating us from each other is really quite porous.

      In actuality, modern physics shows that our consciousness connects us quite intimately. Nobel physicist Erwin Schrödinger described our profound interconnectedness this way:

      Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown. There is only one thing, and that which seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception, the Indian maya, as in a gallery of mirrors.¹

      Such realizations of one consciousness can give rise to a fear of uncontrolled, telepathic intimacy, and a possibly troubling loss of privacy. As our personal egos are diminished by advances in scientific knowledge, however, our concept of who we are is greatly enhanced. As we learn to surrender more and more of our attachment to our egos, we can participate in the most profound intimacy without fear of losing ourselves. We can share the energetic flow of loving awareness with others and expand our knowledge of who we really are. Intimacy is not to be feared; it is to be celebrated. What we discover from the data of “psi,” or psychical research, is that we are capable of expanded awareness far beyond our physical bodies.

      In fact, the principle finding of this research demonstrates that there is no known spatial or temporal limit to our awareness. That is to say, in consciousness there is only one of us here. Or, as the Buddhists and quantum physicists continuously remind us, “Separation is an illusion.”

       NO END TO SCIENCE IN SIGHT

      We often hear that the end of physics is just a few years away — to be described, as Michio Kaku recently said, “with an equation less than one inch long.”² Similarly, Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg recently published a long essay in the New York Review of Books describing his “search for the fundamental principles that underlie everything.”³ He added, however, that “science in the future may take a turn that we cannot now imagine. But, I see not the slightest advance sign of such a change” (my emphasis).

      Scientists have been saying this sort of thing for more than a century. For example, in the late 1800s Lord Kelvin made the now-famous statement that physics was complete, except that “only two small clouds remain on the horizon of the knowledge of physics.” The two clouds were: first, the interpretation of the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment (which did not detect any effects of the widely hypothesized “aether”), and second, the failure of then-contemporary electromagnetic theory to predict spectral distribution of black-body radiation. These little clouds led to the discovery of special relativity, quantum mechanics, and what we think of today as modern physics.

      In 1975, at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, the same Steven Weinberg declared, “What we want to know is the set of simple principles from which the properties of particles, and hence everything else, can be deduced.” Then, at Cambridge University in 1980, revered astrophysicist Stephen Hawking told his audience, “I want to discuss the possibility that the goal of theoretical physics might be