First off, a disclaimer (please don’t ask, “what took you so long?” cuz it never occurred to me when I started this that I would need to disclaim) - I am not an experienced remote viewer, nor have I done lots of research on the phenomenon (and if it looked like I was trying to give that impression, my apologies - that was never my intention). When I made my original post here a few days ago, what was supposed to happen was, anyone who was interested would check out the HRVG site, and if they had any questions, they’d post them on the BBS there, where the senior and knowledgeable members of the guild could answer the questions quickly and competently. I’ve never done any real research, and I haven’t viewed much either; just enough to know that this is a genuine, if mystifying phenomenon - that was the extent of MY research, because once I experienced it myself I didn’t feel the need to research it further. I’ve a relatively extensive math background for a non-scientist, I know probabilities, and what I experienced, over time, was not coincidence or my mind making it up. If you think my answers are a bunch of hooey, and you really would like someone to answer your questions well, there is no better place to ask them than the HRVG BBS. It is an open forum, no membership required. Y’all are asking some very specific technical questions that in some cases, no reasonable person in the RV community would admit having an answer to. I’ll do my best based on my experience, and what I’ve learned from picking the brains of some of the viewers in HRVG.
CK Dexter Haven - there are several different protocols within any remote viewing method to determine characteristics of the target. Any particular target is going to have several characteristics. There are at least dozens of adjectives in the English language. One specific protocol in HRVG method restricts a viewer to, I think, around a dozen adjectives (other protocols are freeform, though, where you use any adjective that comes to mind). I don’t know if I’d be violating the non-disclosure agreement by listing the specific adjectives here, but suffice to say they are basic adjectives, similar to what you talked about in your post. The probability that you would get any one or two congruent characteristics is, of course, excellent … but the more adjectives you write down, the more improbable that you just coincidentally described the target. Over the course of an entire session, as you draw more pictures and list more adjectives, the chances of you coincidentally describing a target become incredibly remote.
Using your Eiffel tower example - say you perceive something tall and thin with some kind of texture to it (as opposed to plain or smooth, for the purpose of this example) while working in the visuals protocol. Your mind interprets it as a giraffe, so that is what you draw. It is a “hit” because of all the millions of things in the universe that you could have perceived, you perceived something tall and thin with some kind of texture to it. You also could have perceived a small smooth ball or a wide striped rectangle, but you didn’t. So yes, there are LOTS of things you could draw that would not be a metaphor or symbolic.
And since I mentioned interpretation - the HARDEST skill to develop in remote viewing is not actually getting congruent (non-coincidental) data - that part is startlingly easy. The hardest part is keeping one’s thinking mind from interpreting the raw data, and writing down something incredibly sophisticated when all that was really perceived was, tall, thin, textured. We are so hard-wired for data interpretation, that keeping the conscious mind from interpreting the raw data is very, very difficult. For the first several stages of HRVG protocol, the viewer is NOT supposed to write down interpretive data, he/she is supposed to stick to relatively simple descriptive terminology. This is because for the first several stages the viewer is in an alert state, when it is difficult for the conscious mind to perceive anything other than very basic information via the subconscious. Later protocols are relied on for the sophisticated data, because the later protocols are conducted while the viewer is in a guided theta state (i.e., half-awake or meditative) and the connection between the conscious and subconscious is clearer. The average RV students get months of work at the basic alert-state levels before moving on to the altered-state protocols.
Irishman - yes, my statement was overly broad concerning skeptics, that was just me being cynical. What I should have said was, “Cynics don’t play fair.” (Wordplay intentional :). I don’t know who the guy was.
HRVG is a non-profit organization whose mission is to do research on RV. There’s probably tons of money out there and lots of great skeptics whose credentials and methods would be impeccable. Problem is, everyone in the guild has a full-time job doing something else, and it takes so much time and effort and skill to find those skeptics, find the money or write the research grant proposals, that it just hasn’t happened yet for the guild. Meanwhile, there are some genuine crackpots out there remote viewing Jesus, Martians, Armageddon, and Hale-Bopp aliens, and are therefore marginalizing the entire RV community, because the crackpots are the ones who get the publicity. We’ve got some great anecdotal experience that suggests that remote viewing is at least partly a wave-propagation phenomenon - that would be a great place to start. But it will probably be years before any kind of intensive research begins.
I’ve no idea what JREF is. Glenn, the guild president, might know, if you wanted to ask this question on the HRVG BBS. Glenn is also the one who doesn’t trust Randi - he thinks Randi is a cynic, not a skeptic (to use my terminology, not Glenn’s).
Quote from your post: Question: how do you keep a randomly generated string of numbers or letters from accidentally having a connection to some other target? Especially if you use some common and small sequence like a 4 digit number. Do you know how many ways a single 4 digit number could be connected to just about anything I wanted it to? A creative person could probably find a way to interpret any code to have an ambiguous alternative target.
Response to Irishman (and Chronos) - HRVG uses 8 characters for target IDs. The IDs are vetted for coincidental associations to commonly known objects or subjects before being assigned to targets. In any group of people, the chances of a vetted ID meaning something to any one person might be decent, but the chances of it meaning something to most of the people is usually remote. Another part of the process, that I mentioned in a previous post, is that the targeteer intends for the ID to be associated with a particular target, and by some unknown mechanism, most viewers can easily follow that path of intention to the target, even if part of the ID has some other association for a particular viewer. Part of the problem with the “skeptic” that I mentioned is that he intended to mislead viewers by using the IDs associated with aircraft. Ironically, some viewers who weren’t even familiar with aircraft viewed aircraft in their sessions. One viewer that I can think of got both aircraft AND data congruent to the real target, which was a guy bungee-jumping off the side of a building. Another very interesting note about targeteering intent - Glenn has stated that it is far more difficult to view targets where the ID was assigned to the target by a computer instead of by a human being. Another note - we (usually) view targets double blind, i.e., the targeteer is not present in the room when the target ID is given to the viewers.
Irishman also said-------- What bugs me about remote viewing - like all psychic phenomena, the results rely strongly on subjective evaluation. It takes interpretation to make the results meaningful, but there are not any guidelines to interpretation. It often looks like post hoc explanation to take whatever is drawn or written and then fit it to the answer you want. ----------
Something that HRVG is very strongly opposed to is using ONE viewer and ONE session to make any claims about the effectiveness of remote viewing. No one viewer, no matter how good or how experienced, is capable of producing data that doesn’t have some bad bits in it. HRVG relies on teams of four viewers doing multiple sessions on one target. All the data is run through an analysis process that throws out single bits of information. Only information corroborated by at least three viewers makes it through the analysis process.
All viewers go through cycles where sometimes they are getting great data, and other times, they couldn’t remote view the contents of their pants pocket. Using groups of at least four people, working multiple sessions, usually guarantees that you can get enough congruent data to produce some significant analysis on a target.
Another problem in trying to explain this skill is that so many people automatically assume that if they aren’t seeing results like what they see in sci-fi/fantasy movies, then remote viewing must not be a genuine phenomenon. If you were remote viewing a dolphin, and you got “wet, gray, smooth, curvy,” that would be GREAT! Out of all the possible adjectives you could have chosen, what were the odds you would choose those four at random? - I’m not very good at explaining this, though, nor the rest of the stuff you brought up in your post, although I have seen it addressed previously, both on the BBS and in conversations with experienced viewers. There are constraints on how to do remote viewing, how to evaluate it, and how to measure accuracy - at least within the HRVG protocols. If you posted your questions concerning the methods, evaluation, and accuracy on the BBS, a senior member of the guild could address them far better than I can.
Folks, I have answered your questions to the best of my ability - but you have rapidly outstripped that limited ability, and I would be doing you a disservice if I attempted to answer any further questions about remote viewing in general, or the HRVG method of remote viewing. I highly recommend that if you have any further questions, you post them on the HRVG BBS (I recommend that one because I’ve never visited other BBS’s). I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. The BBS can be found at the HRVG website, http://www.hrvg.org.
Muchas gracias for your time -
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