Gen wrote:
Sometimes old-timers or those invested in a certain system can mistake the map for the territory. Which is my issue with remote-viewing...as I have been trying to express, rather ineptly.
'The map for the territory' is a good way to put it.
Remote viewing is a system. It seems like a good system. But it was not given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. It's man-made. A man-made system intended to harness a psychic ability that we do not yet fully understand. So, we are not going to know how RV works because we don't know how psychic abilities work.
I agree.
One of my concerns about RV -- and I don't want to sound superstitious but maybe it's unavoidable -- is that it takes psychic abilities out of the context in which they have traditionally been used.
I agree with this as well. On one hand, I am RV's hugest fan, mostly for the science aspect; I feel it 'rescued' psi from the 'muck' of social culture it's been entwined with since the dawn of time, on several levels. On the other hand, as a viewer I see there are places where to some degree, you might say that a bit of baby got thrown out with that bathwater (I'm sorry I didn't use an IT analogy, heh). While the world of the mystic may have a lot of issues that cause problems in utilizing psychic functioning, that world also has several thousand years more experience with the subject--and some of that is pretty important.
A sterile room and a laboratory setting will not make it any safer.
Traditional efforts that placed psi in a magical (or in occult frameworks, magickal) context had a lot more awareness of the "who is to be Master" question. This is something that in RV is seen in science (the 'sheep and goats' effect they dubbed it) and is seen in layman applications work (usually in 'tasker overlay' and other related issues), but is barely even addressed let alone comprehended in the more 'objective, clinical' settings. This has had significant effects even in science, where 'experimenter-effect' and 'DAT' have become so obvious that even rudimentary (let alone detailed) statistics spell it out in small words with big letters.
As another related issue, most people want to examine psi as if they can put it in a test tube; you can doubleblind the situation but that's all you can really do. The reality is that every mind who is part of something, with particular influence/weight given to those 'in charge' in some fashion, can affect an overall psychic result. I might add that the most successful viewer and lab in the world in this area actually published a paper titled "Intention, Attention and Expectation" specifically addressing this as something they had observed very clearly over 25 years of time.
Now it would be fair to expect any skeptic to say, "What? Me thinking badly about it makes someone else less effective? Bosh!" but it's a matter of the context here: IF psi has reality, then it IS logical that this would be the case because everybody is psi and every situation has those dynamics--if one steps back from the woo-woo element psi unavoidably gives things, and thinks of it in terms of "social dynamics and the psychology of dominance" it's about the same. If psi has NO reality, then the approach of "nothing matters" (such as the situation and mindset of persons involved let alone in charge of an experiment) would be accurate. But you cannot objectively test something 'to see if it exists' while utilizing an approach which if it DID exist would be most likely to reduce or suppress it; it's the scientific equivalent of throwing the witch into the water with rocks and if she drowns, congratulations she was innocent.
Anyway, I mention those things only a small summary example of some of the kinds of things I think relate to your comment; this is a fairly huge topic that can't be well addressed in a single forum post.
Human traditions, older than civilization itself, suggest that psychic ability is safe to use only in the context of a wholehearted and wise spiritual path. If you use it outside of that context, it can become dangerous in any number of ways. We have ten thousand years of tradition warning us about this.
Seriously, I have not seen any sign that persons using remote viewing without 'spiritual enlightenment', or using it for practical reasons, have fared any worse than others in the art. In all honesty, I think *some* of this is a cultural artifact akin to people who truly believe that poor people are more spiritual and wealthy people are de-facto amoral sinners, greedy, etc. This is really not accurate at all but it persists as a cultural norm, probably in great part because there is an element of psycho-social buffering (making people feel better) involved with that.
However, I have observed--and some intelligent viewers dispute this I might add, so my opinion is just one--that psychic functioning, particularly in RV since 'hard feedback' has a vastly more impactive effect on belief systems (hence change of fundamental psychological constructs which literally are about 'the nature of reality' and 'identity'), is inherently 'destabilizing'. This doesn't mean that it makes people crazy, it just means that you can't mess with core belief systems without literally causing some turbulence in the psychology. Healthy people "adapt"; it's a matter of 'keeping your balance' and learning adaptive behaviors at times, even though the ground is moving a bit beneath you, so to speak. Some people have genuine psyche issues though--the very sort associated with psychic work throughout time. To the degree of actual psychotic breaks and other stuff you will probably never hear about publicly (a sort of field-wide adaptive dsyfunction... on some psychic level we agree not to talk about this LOL).
Generally, I mean culturally here, the whole "pure heart" bit is thought to be more protective, and perhaps it is. I have not noticed it though. I suspect IF it is, it is for reasons having to do with other aspects of 'intent' and 'positive correspondence with self' than the psi part. In other words, it's a little like working with subconscious, say in Jungian-style archetype work. People who have a very positive framework for that feel safer and more positive, and unusual experiences get a positive interpretation, and frightening things are buffered. People who don't have that framework, particularly who have existing issues with fear, can just spiral down into psychological disaster frankly (and man, paranormal side effects are out the wazoo when you combine the power of an emotion like fear with psi stuff).
But that isn't so much the psi element, as that working with the subconscious (let alone messing with core belief systems) is powerful stuff, and how one deals with that, models it, is a big part of how well they weather it. Much like learning some sports, some is boring, some is thrilling, most is just-doing-it, and once in awhile something slams your face into the dirt and drags you several yards and then dogpiles on you (LOL - rugby/football analogies!). It isn't that one wants a perfectly safe world; it's that one wants to be flexible and strong and healthy enough to "deal with it" and move on without crying about it or taking their ball and going home or freaking out entirely.
Maybe all the stuff we think is mumbo-jumbo is really an intrinsic part of the way things work.
Some might be.
Maybe some seers use crystals, for instance, because they are protective in a way that we don't yet understand.
Maybe. RV as taught is actually a little bit separating; close rapport is discouraged mostly because of (a) the effect on the viewer and (b) the effect on the session overall. However close rapport is often where the best data is. So it's a fine line to walk and viewers make their own decisions about it. Witness-based psi formats such as scrying, tarot, tea leaves or whatever, "project" the data into something "other"; as opposed to the viewer being "of" the target and the only 'witness'--objective 'thing representing psi data'--is the session itself.
We don't know. This is all borderland stuff, including RV, and just because RV can wear a labcoat doesn't mean that it is not a wild animal.
Nice way of putting it.
I don't know how my own abilities work. When I get "answers," I'm not sure where they come from. Some crazy-Christians might hear me say that and conclude "maybe it's...SATAN." Could fucking be. I highly doubt it, but I don't know.
Most psi data is both much simpler and much more complex than assigning any 'identity' to the process in my opinion. Information/energy just "is". One can group it into forms (or identities) that appear to be innately 'bad vs. good' (and I am not suggesting I don't believe in this by the way), but information itself does not, in my view, have any inherent good or evil. (Aside maybe from "eat the apple, Eve" LOL.) However any kind of information, particularly the more violent, volatile or emotional, can have problems even via "quantity" if too much comes through at once; even too much of a good thing can be a problem.
(Not to mention really obscure stuff can affect you. In one session years ago I got this feeling that "this huge darkness is coating my heart"--a sort of "emotional analogy"--and GRIEVED as if heavily depressed for three days before I shook it off. The target was the Exxon Valdez disaster. Er, yeah. Try telling anybody "I grieved because years ago some ship spilled oil" and they'll definitely think you're nuts. Not to mention some of the really GROSS things that trauma targets can give you for an instant.)
There's an Icarus-y-ness to remote viewing that gives me the heebie-jeebies, that's all.
Life is risk. You can't steal second with one foot on first.
