Limitless Mind. Russell Targ

to as a “world line.” This movement can be as mundane as meeting a friend tomorrow at 4:00 P.M. on the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway, or as cosmic as experiencing oneness with the universe. Essentially, real-time remote viewing — or any psychic experience — demands that the awareness of the individual is not separate from (or is “contiguous with”) a specific target at a distant location. This ability to nonlocally access information that is blocked from ordinary perception can be described as the result of an apparent zero-separation between the viewer and the target. Similarly, in order for precognition to occur, one must be contiguous in awareness with the future event that is sensed. The complex eight-space model can always provide a path (the “world line”) in space and time that connects the viewer to a remote target so that the viewer experiences zero spatial and/or temporal distance in the metric.

      It appears that, in the realm of consciousness, there may or may not be a separation, depending on one’s intention. It is evident to Dr. Rauscher and me that remote-viewing abilities are fundamental to our understanding of consciousness itself. In fact, psi functioning may be the means that consciousness uses to make itself known in the internal and external physical world.

      Dr. Rauscher and I recognize that every theory of being is perishable, and that one day it may be found that complex Minkowski space is not the best model for psi. We are confident, however, that two factors will remain: (1) that these phenomena are not a result of an energetic transmission, and (2) that they are, rather, an interaction of our awareness with a nonlocal, hyperdimensional space-time in which we live.

      How does consciousness access this nonlocal space? We believe it does so through the process of intentionality, which is fundamental to any goal-oriented process including retrieval of memory. In fact, the universality of nonlocality is simply there, existing as the fundamental nature of space and time. That is, it is not a physical thing, but it is available to be accessed at will.

      It now seems clear that ordinary people can access nonlocal space. We have seen remarkable results in hundreds of remote-viewing trials with hundreds of viewers, in the laboratory and in public workshops all over the world. Without a doubt, people can learn to use their intuitive consciousness in a way that transcends conventional understanding of space and time to describe and experience places and events that are blocked from ordinary perception. The whole force of the data in this book shows this to be true.

      So the phenomenon exists, but how does it work? We don’t know the complete answer to that question, although some things about the answer are known. For example, the data from more than a hundred years of psi research show that there is no significant decline in the accuracy of any kind of ESP with increasing distance between the viewer and the object viewed. We also know that it is no more difficult to look a short distance into the future than it is to describe a present-time hidden target. The data supporting these two assertions, from both SRI and Princeton, are very strong.

      We can also conclude from the data that it is very unlikely that any kind of electromagnetic field is involved in carrying psi signals. We conclude this because the very geometry of our three-dimensional space requires that signal strength decrease as you get farther from the source. In fact, an electromagnetic signal decreases in proportion to the square of the distance. That is, the radio signal you receive ten miles from the transmitter is 100 times weaker than the signal you pick up at one mile. At 10,000 miles distance, as in our Moscow-to-San-Francisco experiments, the radio signal would be 100 million times weaker than it would be at one mile away. Yet we do not see the slightest evidence of such a distance-related decrease in psi ability, even though the popular model for ESP involves some kind of mental radio in which my mind “sends a signal” to your mind. We believe that this is probably not a valid model.

      In spite of the problem with this model, there is a wonderful book called Mental Radio, originally written in 1930 by the great American novelist and muckraker Upton Sinclair.¹² This book contains an extremely valuable description of the psychic process, written by Sinclair’s intensely psychic wife Mary Craig. Sinclair and his wife did hundreds of picture-drawing experiments with remarkable success. The book even has a favorable preface by Einstein, who was a friend of the Sinclairs.

      Instead of signals being sent, the data suggest that the desired information is always present and available. In remote viewing, as well as in healing, the agent’s focused intention calls forth the information. Psychic healers and remote viewers both act as messengers. In remote viewing, the viewer translates impressions of the information into drawings and verbal concepts. In psychic diagnosis, the healer interprets impressions from the patient and converts them into clairvoyant diagnoses, and sometimes into energy-manipulating actions to remedy a problem in the patient’s body. Spiritual healing introduces yet another element, whereby the healer acts as a conduit of healing information to the patient from the community of spirit in which we all reside, or from God. Here, the healer makes no translation of the message accessed from nonlocality, which directly stimulates the patient’s cells to reorganize themselves into a healthy pattern.

      To paraphrase the distinguished physicist John Archibald Wheeler, we would again say that the description of the mechanism of psychic abilities will be found in the geometry of space-time, and not in the electromagnetic fields. What Wheeler actually said was, “There is nothing in the world except curved empty space. Matter, charge, electromagnetism... are only manifestations of the bending of space. Physics is geometry!”¹³ When he made this assertion in 1957, what Wheeler had in mind was that, in spite of the successes of quantum theory, the geometrical approach gives a more comprehensive model of space-time. In addition, the physical laws that we experience, such as the laws of gravity and force, derive principally from symmetry laws and from the geometry of the space-time metric. Symmetry laws describe the fact that a given physics experiment conducted at different places or times must give the same result. The law of conservation of energy, which is the foundation of physics, can be derived explicitly from these symmetry laws. Similarly, I think that since psi must be compatible with physics, its explanation will also be derived from the geometry of space-time.

      When we say that the eventual description of the physics of psi will come from geometry, what we mean is that psi is often seen as paradoxical because we presently misconstrue the nature of the space-time in which we reside. The “naive realist” picture of our reality says that we are each separate creatures sitting on our own well-circumscribed points in space-time. But for the past thirty years, modern physics has been asserting that this model is not correct.

      If this explanation does not seem entirely clear, it is probably because, even though Einstein published these ideas sixty years ago, the smartest physicists in the world still do not agree on all of the implications of these nonlocal connections. In fact, Nobel laureate Brian Josephson wrote of quantum physics experiments:

      The existence of such remote influences or connections is suggested more directly by experiments on phenomena such as telepathy (the connection of one mind to another) and psychokinesis (the direct influence of mind on matter), both of which are examples of so-called psi function-ing.... One may imagine that life may exist from the beginning as a cooperative whole, directly interconnected at a distance by Bell-type nonlocal interactions, following which modifications through the course of evolution cause organisms to be interconnected directly with each other.... One can see conceptual similarities between psi skills and ordinary skills, e.g. between perceptual skills of hearing and telepathy on the one hand, and between the forms of control of matter involved in control of the body, and in psychokinesis, on the other.¹⁴

       SPIRITUAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITIONS

      In addition to the theories of physicists, the writings of poets and philosophers (some of which originated before biblical times) have articulated the idea that physical separations are more illusory than real. Buddhist teachings, following from the earlier Vedic tradition of 500 b.c., propose that human desires, judgments, and attachments, which arise from distinctions such as “here and not here,” “now and not now,” are the cause of all the world’s suffering.

      Aldous Huxley describes the many levels of awareness associated with the “perennial philosophy,” a term for the highest common factor present in all the major wisdom traditions and religions of the world.¹⁵