CONCEPTS ABOUT FUTURE PREDICTIONS
When targeting the future, interesting things can happen to the material during collection. There are unique twists or sudden changes in direction that not only affect the remote viewing and data perception as it is taking place, but they are unique to future viewing and probably don't occur when targeting the past or present. The easiest way to illustrate some of these problems is to present them as examples.
Example One
Let's pretend for a moment that we are living in the year 1850, on the Great Plains of America. This is a place of rolling hills, grass, herds of cattle, and small, scruffy farms, where people are attempting to fight the grass to raise crops. In most cases, they're using the sod to create the homes they are living in.
Imagine now that we are part of a small team of men trying to herd cattle across this vast and open space. Somewhere along the way, perhaps on his last trip to a town, one of the men who can actually read has picked up a tattered penny novel that contains an article on remote viewing. We decide that it would be a great idea to target such a remote viewer toward the future. Maybe we can get a leg up on everyone else by knowing what will happen before it actually happens. Maybe this remote viewer could even tell us a good place to dig for all that gold we've been hearing about out in California.
We're also lucky in a sense, because one of the men working with us—good ol' Frank, who has been riding drag all day and is the last man into camp that night—is currently recovering from a kick in the head by his horse. He almost died, but luckily is now recovering. Because he had a Near Death Experience, he's been having strange knowings since it happened, so we figure he'd make the perfect remote viewer.
So . . . we eventually make camp and we are all sitting around the campfire. We've had our dinner and the conversation has drifted into this thing called remote viewing. Good ol' George shifts over next to Frank and whips out a rough map of California. It's drawn rather crudely on a roll of deerskin. Since we know they've discovered gold in California, it is the perfect place to target Frank against. Maybe he can tell us where to find the big strike.
Following protocol, we don't tell Frank what we are specifically looking for. Instead, George jams his index finger down on the leather map and his nail hits a spot roughly somewhere in a place that doesn't yet exist, a place that will eventually be called Menlo Park.
"OK, Frank, tell us something really important about this spot in some future year. Something that has to do with big money."
Frank stares into the fire until his eyes roll back in his head. He makes a slight groaning sound. It is obvious he has entered a strange, somewhat altered, state. After a few seconds, he looks at us with eyes that seem to be peering off into a void, a never-never land of information. And he says, in terms or phrases none of us has ever heard before:
"I see partially vacated, yard-long tubes of glass five inches in diameter, connected to heavy iron-alloy turbine-like vacuum pumps. I hear high-pitched sounds of intense power outputs, and see fine wire-like cobalt-blue lights coming together in vials of gas, producing very small and narrow bolts of lightning, which are detonating down the glass tubes, striking something that looks like a thick rod of black diamond. The rays of light are shaving thin sections of diamond off like a hot knife through soft butter. The cuts are a hundred times thinner than a human hair."
We all sort of sit there for a second or two, in a kind of shock, before we leap to our feet and run over to check out Frank's saddlebags. We want to know what kind of cactus buds Frank's been mixing in with his beans. It is now quite obvious to us that Frank is certifiably nuts.
What kind of science fiction is this?
While it doesn't make any sense to us at the time, Frank has just given us a near-perfect description of a high-energy pump laser being used to cut silicone. Unfortunately, we haven't a clue what to do with the information.
One of the problems with remote viewing the future is that while you may sometimes get near-perfect remote viewing results, the information will usually make no sense whatsoever.
We will either disregard it completely because it hasn't met our preconceived notions or expectations, or it just won't fit in with any concepts we are currently familiar with.
Continuing to use a pump laser as an example, few know that there were probably six or seven newly industrialized nations prior to 1900 that actually possessed all the elements required to make and operate a laser. The elements they might have lacked they could have built. Had they successfully built one back then, it would have only been a few years' leap from demonstrating the light beam in a lab to cutting and welding steel in industry. There was only one reason why this didn't happen. It was because they were unable to conceptualize it.
What kind of an impact would there have been on industry if someone like Frank had existed around 1850? What kinds of changes would have happened that might have affected the industrial revolution? Could we have learned to cut steel or weld it with a beam of light?
Some say things are as they should be. Concept arrives when it is supposed to, usually in some mystical or magical way. But somehow, I feel that we should be looking just a shade deeper. When it comes to our future, it feels like it should be more important than that.
In the greater sense, it is my belief that we currently possess all that we will ever need to do anything we want. All we really need is to be open to the possibilities. Being open helps us to define the requirements, leads us in the discovery of the new kinds of materials we need, and assists us in processing how they might all go together. Being open allows for the possibility of conceptualizing our future.
So, there are major problems that can crop up when we decide to address the future, whether we are going out a hundred years to look at a not-yet-existing machine, or going out a thousand years to see what our future has in store for us. In either case, the remote viewing can be almost perfect, but actually understanding it will take a whole lot more in the way of effort—not an impossible task, but not an easy one either.
This is actually one of the reasons it has taken so long for this book to be written. Much of what I reveal about the future is not just based on information collected through remote viewing, but also required a great deal of insight. So in a psychic sense, I had to let the information sit and cook, sometimes for extended periods of time. Letting the information jell has helped to expose the sometimes hidden concept encapsulated within. By allowing the information to jell, I was able to more clearly understand it.
When you begin to deal with future predictions, the topic generates an unending supply of questions. Some may be more important than others, but they are all quite interesting. People who doubt what you are doing are quick to respond with remarks such as the following:
–Predicting the future implies that the future is fixed. What about our free will? Doesn't that matter?
–So a possibility exists for multiple universes and parallel universes. How do our actions affect what's going to happen tomorrow? What about these multiple possibilities? How do you reconcile that?
–Bringing something concrete back from the future, like an idea or a concept that doesn't yet exist, must somehow violate our relationship with the future, or the future's relationship with the past. So, how can you do that? How can that happen?
–What about God? Certainly God has something to say about all this.
Most of these questions have been around since humans began thinking about the future and our relationship to it. They have certainly been the grist of many of the science fiction writers since the late 1800s. People throughout history have presented their theories and perceptions about time, both future and past, and how we may be interacting within it. Theologians have commented on their fixed or not-so-fixed perceptions of time and what it means when defining our relationship to God and the great mysteries surrounding our place or purpose for being here. Many religions bring karma into the picture; things like guilt, sin, and eventually our punishment or rewards are hinged on how we believe time operates, how lives are lived.
The thing to remember is that there are a lot of different ways in which to interpret what the future holds for us. The perceptions that I am now going to share are my own, based on what I have observed through remote viewing or in dealing with the paranormal. They are my views as they specifically relate to what I have experienced and my perceptions about time and/or our place within it. Since this is my understanding for how things might work, I must once again caution the reader that my views are always subject to change or modification from time to time. Nothing is forever.
The Fixed Future and Free Will
When a psychic or remote viewer predicts the future, many feel they are simply making a statement about how they think the future will be at a certain place or point within time. Because we do this doesn't guarantee we are going to be correct. In other words, predicting the future does not in any way guarantee its outcome.
Most would like to think that if I predict that something will occur at a specific location in the year 2023, I am giving my best guess about what I believe will be observed at that time and place. That doesn't automatically create a requirement for it actually having to happen. I am only attempting to state something ahead of time and have it be more right than wrong. If what I say happens, then I have only succeeded in correctly describing what I saw or perceived.
Some would argue that since I might have predicted it, I also participated in helping to make it happen—a nice hypothesis and one that may even be true. I discuss this creative aspect of prediction in some detail in the next chapter. But, for now, let's look only at the prediction side of the coin and not the creation side. I think that may help to bring some clarity to the subject of predictions.
One has only to look at how many times a psychic or remote viewer is wrong to see that being psychic isn't a perfect system. There are a lot of predictions that have missed their mark. So, psychic functioning or remote viewing should not be made to appear to be more than what it actually is.
Aside from the creative aspects, the psychic or remote viewer will be right or wrong. If they are right, bully for them, and if they are wrong, then they are simply that, wrong—nothing more and nothing less. In other words, it's OK to be right or wrong, and no one should castigate a psychic for being too much of either.
Dean Radin, Ph.D., in his book The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena, Harper, San Francisco, 1997, says it best when he compares the study of the paranormal to baseball or basketball. No one ever expects a baseball or basketball player to get it right one hundred percent of the time. A really good player is sometimes on and sometimes not. It's the season that matters.
OK, but what about free will?
Well, there may be a hidden seed or agenda within our natural human ability to make predictions. If by making a prediction we are in some way supporting or providing a basis for that future, helping in effect to create it, then I don't view this as negative or destructive to the exercising of free will. On the contrary. The act of predicting could then be considered, by definition, a flagrant display of free will in action.
My view of how this might actually be operating is outlined in more detail in the chapter titled "The Verne Effect."
Multiple/Parallel Universes
Multiple universes are probably a fact. We have only to look at and study human beings and cognition to see that multiple universes exist and are very real. Every man, woman, or child alive on the planet today lives within his or her own universe. It is a universe based on our observations and/or our experiences, which have been recorded by us from the moment of our conception. In this, no two human beings are alike.
Knowledge is personal, and is steeped within a personal understanding about what we have perceived. In some cases, the differences between us may be small and not very apparent, but in others there may be canyons of variance between what we each believe or think we know. All is constantly being mediated by our own personalized experience and personalized history files.
A good way to exemplify this would be to look at how we perceive the world around us. We are connected to what we perceive as reality through our six senses: taste, smell, touch, sight, hearing, and by our intuitive nature (our innate psychic sense).
Where one of these senses has been partially damaged or hampered, we will usually make up for it with a heightened ability in one or more of the remaining senses. These are the ways through which we interface with reality. It is our way of not only perceiving the universe around us, but it is our only way of understanding it.
So when we process something, we can honestly say we "know" something to be true, but it is only "we" that can know what our processing has presented us with. Congruent or like perception in others can only be assumed. If we make assumptions about what others have processed, we may be in error. We can share information and we usually do. But, the best that we can ever say about what someone else might understand about the world around them is that we "believe" what they are saying about it or their understanding of it. We can never know what they know anymore than they can know what we know to be true about this thing we call reality.
It is possible that many of us have actually come to know something that is the same, but this knowing will always be structured within the framework of our own more personalized universe.
So, yes, each of us is a walking universe. Self-contained, interacting perhaps, but always singularly different, one from the other.
This is part of what makes every human being so important to every other human being. Since our realities differ, sometimes radically from one to another, I can think of no better reason for sharing. It's the only way to stay balanced within time/space reality. It's also a good reason for spending more time "listening" than "talking."If you are looking for other reasons to believe why this is so, you need look no further than the underlying causes of war, politics, science, or religion. We, the population of the planet, represent a legion of universes that have come together in loosely knit societies or groups of shared belief. It's how we define ourselves. In some cases, we are willing to live and die for these beliefs, so they must be quite important to this thing we call reality.
Multiple universes seem to support a predictive or paranormal ability. The case for parallel universes is a bit more difficult and is probably best addressed in a separate chapter.
Violating the Future
A number of years ago, I was asked to participate in an experiment proposed by Dr. Dean Radin, who was then located at the Consciousness Research Laboratory, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
He proposed using remote viewing to go into the future to obtain information concerning a machine that was not yet existent. We weren't sure at the time as to how far into the future this might require traveling, but the machine he conceptualized certainly did not yet exist.
What is important to note here is that we were in fact partially successful in this attempt. Since it is still an ongoing experiment, it is impossible to tell what the eventual outcome for this entire process might be.
We have been able to bring back some small elements or parts of the machine that seemed to work, at least the way they were envisioned. Not surprisingly, they do not yet do what he has conceptualized, but instead have opened some rather unusual doors to other prospective areas. Some of these might yet produce a patentable idea. Unfortunately, I am unable to discuss this in any detail, as it is proprietary and still under development.
By doing this, have we somehow broken some existent rules or laws that somehow govern the future? No. It may be that Dean will eventually be successful in creating a completely new machine based, at least in part, on remote viewing. If so, then the existence of the machine within the future may simply be a direct result of what we are doing now.
It is not a violation of future ethics, it is simply a variance on the act of creativity. This is how creativity works. It is how all new things come into existence. I've just put a paranormal label on it.
New ideas are conceptualized, thought about, then attempts are made to bring them into reality. How far you are willing to peer into the future and your ability to act on the information, is the seat of power that exists within almost all of the current research, experimental engineering, and cutting-edge labs on the planet. What is surprising to me is that so many of them have not yet caught on to remote viewing.
I am not unique in this perception, or in trying to implement psychic or remote viewing ability in support of new or creative ideas. There are now labs that exist in many countries that are attempting to use remote viewing techniques to gain a foothold on the new technologies of tomorrow.
What saddens me is that most of America still believes these remote viewing abilities to be frivolous, unscientific, or a waste of time.
The "giggle factor" associated with remote viewing or psychic functioning continues to block earnest attempts at using these abilities for humankind's benefit (at least within America). Will we have to wait until some other nation or group of people proves remote viewing has value before we will open to the possibility of using it?
I can't help but think that historically this is how we wound up behind the power curve in the early days of the space race, or why we will probably not be the ones who are going to discover the new machines that are going to replace the computer systems of today. What's going to provide clean and unlimited power to meet our needs in the world of tomorrow? It's already sitting out there waiting to be targeted. Wake up, science.
What was learned early on about remote viewing may be the very reason Hal Puthoff, Ph.D., a man who was instrumental in the beginning investigations of remote viewing at SRI-International, has since struck off on his own in an attempt to address some of these problems. He has produced some very interesting papers on energetic vacuums, the production of energy from nothing, and the velocity-of-light limitations to the Alcubierre warp drive. These issues may one day have an astounding impact on humankind. It may be too early to know, but my gut tells me that he is probably on to something, and certainly remote viewing helped.
This is an important issue. Corporations in America have the means and money to set up or endow research that could support a study of the experimental applications of remote viewing or psychic functioning to creativity, but at present it seems they lack the fortitude or long-range vision necessary to take the risk. Hopefully this will change in the near future.
As a research associate with the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory of Palo Alto, I can say that we stand on the threshold of discovery. We possess an astounding array of experience, capability, and ideas that directly affect this problem. Anyone seriously interested in doing something in this area should contact me, or Dr. Edwin C. May, the director of the lab.
What about God?
My experience with remote viewing and nineteen years of investigation into the paranormal have only underscored the near pristine beauty and veracity of God's involvement within what we call reality and its creation. I look on God as the Grandest of Engineers, the power behind the movement of stars in the one extreme, to warm winds on a summer night in the other. It is our spiritual relationship with God that brings purpose to our interface with reality.
Remote viewing, or psychic functioning, or any talent we humans possess, is a reflection of the Engineer. Such belief clearly supports the idea of free will and it underscores the direct role we play in carrying out the ultimate or grand design.
Because we play such an important role, it is dependent on us to use it within a framework of understanding that has as its base our theological beliefs. We live with the results of our actions. It therefore requires us to understand the ethical and spiritual responsibilities we carry as the Grand Engineer's creations here in physical reality. These are not responsibilities that should be taken lightly. Since we do exercise free will in all of the decisions and actions we carry out on a moment-to-moment basis, we are directly responsible for the changes or effects of these actions, or in some cases, inactions, on reality.
These can range from the simple, ignoring the plight of a single individual, to the more complex, learning to split atoms, and the creative or destructive power that might bring to generations of human beings.
Therefore, it should be a requirement that in understanding how our actions might have an impact on the world around us we not make any decision without at least reflecting on our spiritual responsibilities to our fellow human beings.
One of the great truths that I have learned over the years is that we will most definitely experience what we set into motion through our actions. All of our actions directly affect all that exists within our reality.
Constructive or positive expenditures of energy seem to produce a constructive or positive reality. Destructive or negative expenditures of energy seem to produce a like effect. It is, therefore, not only beneficial for us to try and understand our spiritual nature, to try and mediate what we do, to exercise some degree of control, it is imperative. The theological ideals and hypotheses surrounding our spiritual and/or religious nature are essential if we are to be able to grasp our role within the universe at large. We are all the creations, the children, of the Grand Engineer, and the Grand Engineer has given us the means to both understand reality as well as to manipulate it within its proper context.
I have long since given up on the restricted sense of spirituality that comes from narrowed viewpoints regarding God, especially viewpoints that seem to underscore "requirements" associated with a particular church, sect, belief, or condition.
In my own mind, humankind expresses the need for spiritual awakening in all of the extant religions and religious practices that exist today. Judaism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam all speak to a belief in a higher order of understanding. Each essentially carries the same message—there is a Grand Engineer and we should know something about what that means. We should attempt to reach an understanding about what kind of responsibility that gives us as an integral part of creation.
Unfortunately, many still get sidetracked with the details. Wars are fought and weak excuses are made for atrocities based on these differences of details. An abomination, which only humankind suffers from. One of our worst creations. We are in charge of our reality, and we have only ourselves to blame for the actions that produce such waste.
I can't help but think the Grand Engineer didn't see this as a possibility. Maybe the fact that we create our own reality is the toughest lesson of all for us to learn and that is why it has taken so long to pull ourselves up to a point of seeing the possibilities.
We all live in a separate universe. Maybe it is time to see and understand that it is the confluence of these universes that constitutes the reality we will always experience.