Russell Targ, physicist and co-founder of SRI’s CIA-backed $20M remote viewing program (1972–1995), explains how trained participants—including skeptics—accurately described distant targets like Soviet weapon factories matching classified satellite images. His work also explored remote healing, where healers like Jane Katra influenced patients thousands of miles away via "non-local consciousness," and precognition, achieving 11/12 hits in predicting solar futures. Targ dismisses drug-enhanced psychic claims, linking abilities to ego surrender and spiritual practices from the Vedas to Kabbalah, while noting twins may retain quantum-connected intuition. Though Cold War-era programs ended, he suggests psychic research could still uncover threats like nuclear devices, hinting at potential Soviet or Chinese follow-ups. Ultimately, Targ frames these abilities as tools for transcending materialism—not exploitation—while warning against ego inflation in their use. [Automatically generated summary]
From my death of the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening and or good morning.
Wherever you may be in this great land of ours and beyond, outwest from the Tahitian and Hawaiian Islands, eastward to the Caribbean and U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north all the way to the Pole, and worldwide on the internet.
This is Coast A.M. I'm Mark Bell.
morning The show tonight is going to be a very, very good one.
Russell Targ is a physicist and author who was a pioneer in the development of the laser and many laser applications and co-founder, along with Hal Putoff, of the Stanford Research Institute's Investigation into Psychic Abilities in the 1970s and 80s.
He's co-author of Mind Reach, Scientists Look at Psychic Abilities, The Mind Race, Understanding and Using Psychic Abilities, and most recently with spiritual healer Jane Katra, Miracles of Mind, Exploring Non-Local Consciousness and Spiritual Healing, and Heart of the Mind, How to Know God Without Belief.
How to Know God Without Belief.
Oh, is that going to be interesting?
Last year, Russell Targ retired from Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space Company as a senior staff scientist where he developed airborne laser systems for the detection of wind shear and other peaceful applications.
He now pursues ESP research at Interval Research Corporation in Palo Alto, California.
His website showing recently declassified data from the SRI remote viewing program is linked on my website, but it's http: ESPresearch.com.
So one might ask, what do the healer, mystic, and psychic, and psychic spy all have in common?
Indeed, one might ask that.
They're all in touch with their non-local mind and our community of spirit.
Stanford Research Institute conducted investigations into the human capability called remote viewing.
SRI's research was supported by the CIA and many other government agencies for two decades.
Its task was to learn to understand PSI abilities and to gather information about the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Mr. Targ was co-founder of this $20 million program, which began in 1972, and he will describe his participation, the founding of this previously secret research.
He will discuss recent research in distant healing, quantum interconnectedness, how the future affects the past, some of the implications of developments in modern physics or PSI research, and applications.
Aruzzle is going to compare the inflow of information that is a hallmark of remote viewing, the outgo of intention that plays a part in facilitating distant healing, with the stillness of ego surrender that can arise between the two.
In the beginning, Hal Putoff and I joined Stanford Research Institute.
We're both physicists.
In fact, we're both laser physicists, had done similar things before we came to Stanford.
And we had the idea that we would bet our careers at this point, 1972, that we could learn enough about psychic abilities to do repeatable, reliable experiments, teach people how to get in touch with the part of themselves that's psychic, and publish our findings in the standard academic journals like Nature Magazine and the Proceedings of the IEEE.
We felt that at that point there was enough information about psychic abilities so that using reinforcement and feedback like you have in conventional psychology, we could assist people to learn how to contact their own psychic selves and that we could learn something about incorporating ESP into our lives.
Well, at that time, there were a lot of experiments that had been done at Duke University by J.B. Rine with card guessing, and people were able to guess significantly more cards right than you would expect by chance.
His work is well Known.
But in the end, although people showed a lot of ESP, that ability declined.
And it's as though J.B. Rine, through boredom, having people guessing cards, discovered that it was possible to extinguish ESP in the laboratory.
And that's, of course, not at all what his plan was.
So we tried to use much more interesting materials.
You have to motivate a person to stretch himself, to get in touch with the part of themselves that is psychic, quiet their mind, and be able to expand their awareness, to take part in the abilities that are available.
And you have to pay attention to the people one by one and not run them like rats through an experiment.
For the decade I was at SRI, we worked with a wide variety of people, government scientists, skeptical CIA engineers, cabinet-level visitors from the high-level government, and SRI scientists who were overseeing our program, and Army officers.
And each one of those was treated with respect as an individual special person.
We would just do one or two trials with them a day where they would have to describe what it looked like and what was going on at a distant location where somebody else was hiding.
And our surprising finding is that psychic abilities is a latent ability, like a musical ability.
Most people have that.
And with a little guidance and a little permission, almost all people can learn to develop psychic abilities.
Well, what's surprising is that if you love to listen to music and somebody will teach you to read music, then it's quite surprising.
And I had this experience not too long ago, that even a fairly unmusical person can find that he's playing a little mozzared or a little bach on the piano just if he extends the effort.
It used to be 30 years ago that any well-brought up young man or woman was expected to learn to play the piano.
That's gone away now.
But just as psychic abilities are latent in us, we have taught at SRI dozens and dozens of people how to separate out the psychic noise, which we can talk about later.
Now, I believe this is an offshoot of Stanford's research, but are you aware of the software program that is out there that allows you to try to sit there and affect a random number generator?
I'm sure you know about that.
Yes.
That thing works, Russell, and it works so well.
Let me tell you how well it works.
I can set it to running, and it will score you at the end of a certain period of time.
And I can start the program running and leave the room and go do something in the other room and come back, and the scores between 0 and 100% will be down like about 20%, 30%, consistently, Russell.
But when I sit there and I try to manipulate the photographs in that software program, I consistently come up with 80, 85, 90, even 95% every single time.
This work has been going on at Princeton University for almost 20 years now under the directorship of Bob John, the physics professor, engineering professor.
And they have found that a wide variety of people, again, are able to affect their random number generators.
There's a kind of a micro-psychokinesis where a person interacts with the machine to cause a change in the random distribution of the machine.
In our work, we're concerned with the interaction between people where the outflow of intention of a healer is able to affect the health and well-being of a person in a distant place.
So in the distant healing, we think that this is not so much a psychokinetic ability, but the very well-documented data that we talk about involves apparently a healer outflowing her intention to provide a kind of psychic template so the distant person is able to understand
So the person at a distance is able to mobilize his or her own immune system and recuperative capabilities so that they get better.
And the data for this distant healing is now becoming very, very strong.
But, Russell, you would think it would have to be, to really work, be more than a sort of a psychic get-well card.
In other words, there's some actual manipulation.
Believe me, my own dad has used a healer with some effect.
I mean, I've seen it in my own family, and we're full of pragmatic folks, with the exception of one of my sisters.
Very, very pragmatic.
My dad is somebody who would never in a million years have considered this, but he did it and claimed it worked, and I can't imagine how it could work without there being a specific more than just a sort of a mental suggestion or a mental get-well card.
In other words, if you've got tumors on your liver, Russell, and somebody at a distance is able to do something that causes those tumors to either shrink or go into remission or go away, something real happened there.
What it appears is that there's a near-field effect.
When the healer is up close with the patient, you have something perhaps like therapeutic touch, which is really therapeutic non-touch, as you know.
In the near-field, you might have an energetic interaction between the healer and the sick person.
But the interesting observation from the published data now is that healers all over the country can affect sick people who are thousands of miles away, and the distance between them doesn't make any difference.
See, it blows me away because of all the people that I've talked to with regard to remote viewing, I've always asked about the ability to remotely affect something.
And at that point, almost every single remote viewer has backed away a million miles an hour, and they say, I don't think that can be done.
We don't know anything about it.
And yet, remote healing seems to use the same rough medium and does, in fact, have an effect.
In our first book, In Miracles of Mind, Jane and I got together because she is a spiritual healer and I'm as a remote viewing teacher.
We felt that there was a commonality between these two things.
Many people want us to write two books.
Why don't Russell write about psychic spying and Jane write about spiritual healing?
But we felt that they were related.
And the way they're related is that in the remote viewing, you are inflowing information, and it appears that in the distant healing, you're outflowing.
The data indicate that the distant healing, which can span the continent, the only way we know that you can have connections spanning thousands of miles with no change in effect with distance is not to have it an energetic.
If you've got a psychic searchlight in Chicago, it's going to be very hard for you to affect somebody in San Francisco to the same extent as somebody across the room.
It doesn't make sense.
But in the remote viewing and the psychic perception data that we have, we know for a fact that you can see things 10,000 miles away equally well that you can see something across the room.
And we had the inspiration of Ingo Swan, who taught us all how to do remote viewing.
Ingo is without a doubt the father of remote viewing as we know it in America.
And we saw him do that.
And we also saw Pat Price do it.
Both of these men were a gift to the field.
They were both incredible.
Ingo, of course, is still alive.
Pat is deceased.
But both of these people were psychic superstars who showed us what remote viewing looks like.
The next person that I worked with was Hella Hammett.
The CIA wanted us to bring in a control person.
They said, we've seen what Ingo and Pat Price can do.
They can create architecturally accurate drawings of distant places.
But these men are experienced psychics that use DSC in their lives.
We want to see what an ordinary person does.
And I chose Hella Hammett, who is a lifelong friend of mine, Life's magazine photographer, and she promised me that she had not done any psychic stuff before.
And I remember sitting on the floor in our laboratory.
Helputoff had gone to hide someplace, and Hella and I at that point had to figure out what I'm going to tell her to do and provide the guidance that was really the hallmark of the work for the next 20 years.
We're at the bottom of the hour, so you take a brief break.
Russell Targ is my guest, and you're in for, as I said, as you can see now, a real treat tonight.
Going back to the genesis of the remote viewing program, Russell Targ with Hal Putoff, with Ingo Swan, who indeed is the father of remote viewing, and by the way, lives just over the hill from me.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
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Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from September 7, 1999.
Thank you.
Falling in love was the last thing I had on my mind.
Holding you is a warmth that I thought I could never find Just trying to decide Or stay by your side I know I could cry I just can't find the answer to the questions that keep going through my mind Baby, isn't it time?
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Tonight's program originally aired September 7th, 1999.
Russell, I have a very serious question about remote viewing itself.
What can I tell you?
My understanding of it is that you have a control person who will issue a number, it can be a number, I guess, or it can be almost anything, to the remote viewer.
The remote viewer, then based on that, will attempt to visualize where a person is hiding an object or, I don't know, something at a distance.
And then to actually perhaps even sketch what it is.
How are you able to discern that the remote viewer is in fact discerning or getting this information through the remote viewing process that we all know you worked on for 20 years versus some sort of mental communion between the control and the remote viewer?
I not only don't know where they've gone, but I don't even know where they might have gone.
See, off to the side, this is a kind of lesson.
If you're looking for a psychic as you walk down the avenue and you want a fortune teller, and you go into Madame Catherine's salon and you say, let me tell you about myself.
My name is Art, and I live in wherever I live.
And she says, well, tell me what's your problem.
That woman is not really a psychic.
The real psychic will say, no, no, don't tell me anything.
I don't want to know anything because everything you tell her makes her job harder.
So she wants to work with a blank slate and know nothing.
So a real psychic does not go on a fishing expedition.
In the very oldest of all scriptures, in the earliest Vedas, 2,500 years before Christ, the very first mystic who sat peacefully on a rock looked out and noticed that separation is an illusion, that we are not separated from other things, and in particular, we're not separated from one another.
And all religions came from that idea that we're all connected to each other.
I want to describe something to you, and you tell me what this was.
This was all two years ago on the program, and we were discussing remote viewing, and I didn't have a very good concept in my own mind of what remote viewing really was, I guess, but I wanted to try and experiment.
So I took an object here in the house, and I put it in a specific place, and I said, all right, all of you out there, draw this object.
And I got about a gazillion wrong drawings, but here's the big but.
I got two drawings which were specifically the item.
And the item was a little 4x6 marble laser picture of me, you know, that somebody had put into a marble by laser.
And it was in a little metal frame that kind of curled around it, holding it in a very strange way.
And Russell, two people sent me exact drawings of the marble photograph with the metal going, curving in exactly the way that it was.
And then there was one additional thing.
My wife and I both felt almost violated during the time this experiment was going on, which was, I don't know, about an hour, hour and a half, something like that.
It's like you could feel a thousand eyes around you.
Now, maybe we were setting ourselves up to feel that.
That's a very popular experiment, as you may know.
It's called distant staring.
Now, originally, this is a kind of guy kind of experiment, because guys have the idea that if you stare at the back of a woman's neck in the theater, you can make her turn around.
But out of that came a very easy to replicate scientific experiment where you have a person sitting quietly in a soundproof room with electrodes connected to a couple of fingers so you can measure his or her skin resistance.
And you have a video camera looking at that person.
Then in another room, you have a viewer looking at the video so that he can see the person.
And then on a random schedule, sometimes he will and sometimes he will not look at the video at the television.
So some of the time, to make it concrete, some of the time the guy is staring at the woman and sometimes he's not.
And what we have shown in work at Mind Science Foundation in Texas and at work at SRI and all over the world, this staring experiment, is during those periods where the person's video image is being attended to, you get a change in skin resistance and also blood volume.
So the person's physiology is aware that somebody is attending to them.
And this has been very, very well replicated, this kind of distance staring.
You don't even have to be physically staring at the person if you're just attending to the image.
So you're feeling that millions of people were looking in on your house and you had that experience.
I can certainly concur that that's a likely thing to have happened to you.
what other energy cannot be used for both well energy only is Remote viewing is a perception, and you can use remote viewing to find your lost car keys or to spy on somebody.
But energy is a force of nature.
All that energy, ordinary energy, can do is heat something up.
There's no beam that I can shine on you to make you cold.
That you are allowing the person to achieve a kind of resonance with the healer and heal themselves and pull themselves together.
And that kind of loving energy appears to manifest from the surrender of the healer.
In experiments with Olga Wuhrl that Elizabeth Rauscher and Beverly Rubick did, there was a great experiment where Olga Wuerl, a famous, powerful healer, they wanted her to kill the bacteria in a test tube.
And she said, I have no way of doing that.
I can only heal things.
The healers are not able to kill stuff.
So the experimenters infected the bacteria, gave the bacteria a penicillin so they were dying.
And then Olga Worrel could extend the lives of the sick bacteria.
And I can see how the control could easily be done on that.
Wow.
All right.
Then see what you think of this.
For a while, I conducted a series of about seven experiments, Russell, mass experiments, in which I asked millions of people to concentrate for a protracted period of time on bringing rain to an area that had no rain in the forecast and desperately needed it.
And Russell, it worked and worked again and again and again.
And it actually got to the point where I started having people asking me to have mass concentrations with regard to the course of a hurricane.
And I started getting, I'm not afraid to tell you, I started getting scared because I started imagining, for example, if this is real, and it sure seems to be based on the experiments we have done, then I might stall a hurricane out over a sea where it would build into a category five and then come smashing into land.
In other words, I was in an area that I had no real idea of what I was doing and whether I might be able to do harm instead of good, and so I stopped.
Well, either with respect to remote viewing itself and all you understand about it now, and or the kind of experiment I just talked to you about, is there a possibility of a negative result, danger, either for the remote viewer or for those affected by what's done?
We had been describing distant churches and distant swimming pools with great accuracy and preparing to write a paper for the Institute of Electrical Engineers talking for the first time about the ability to describe things thousands of miles away.
But as always, scientists are looking for money.
And we took our findings to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and showed him what we were able to do with the general idea that this is in the middle of the Cold War, and it seemed obvious to us that we would be able to describe what was going on in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.
And although the CIA is engaged in all sorts of operations that we didn't like, we felt that for the good of the country, for national security, given a choice, we prefer to know what's going on than be ignorant.
Like we, as scientists, we're in favor of information.
So the courageous head of the CIA at that time heard our story and said, you guys are wasting your time looking at swimming pools and churches in Palo Alto.
I have some places that really need a description in the Soviet Union.
If you can describe one of my favorite places, we will support your work.
And that was one Of the great successes of Pat Price, who was able to describe the insides and the outsides of a Soviet weapon factory with very, very great detail.
That was the stuff that we got declassified and was a spur for writing Miracles of Mind.
I got the material declassified through Freedom of Information to me so that I was able to publish the description of the remote viewing work that we did for the CIA and the drawings that Pat Price made.
And just to be on the safe side, I published the letter that the CIA sent to me so that I could print these drawings that still have classified, that still have secret on the top and bottom.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from September 7, 1999.
The Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Every night, I hope and pray.
A dream lover will come my way.
Girl, the home in my You're the magic of her charms.
Girl, the cold dream lover, so I don't have to dream lover.
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time, on Premiere Radio Networks, tonight, an onboard presentation of Coast to Coast AM, from September 7, 1999.
It will definitely take you back, and you'll notice, as you listen to it, if you're old enough, there will come with it a picture of whatever was going on in your life.
It really begins to paint a very, very vivid picture of what was going on in your life at that time.
We would know how to go after that and work on that problem.
We have the ability to describe things that are going on in the distance, often with surprising accuracy.
When we were doing operational things for the CIA, we would generally not be the only ones doing it, but we were just another untested asset to be compared with the other assets that were available.
The directors of CIA said that we want to see if you guys can really do this with an operationally significant target.
So they sent a physicist, a highly intelligent fellow from the CIA, to our lab in California with geographical coordinates, and when I was all sequestered with Price in our electrically shielded room, he gave us the coordinates of some place.
We had no idea what it was at all.
Of course, we suspected it's in the Soviet Union.
And Price, as he would do, would polish his glasses and close his eyes and describe his mental impressions of, in this case, psychically lying on top of a building as a giant crane rolled back and forth over his psychic body.
He said, this is the biggest crane I've ever seen.
It's got wheels on each side of the building.
He said, this is very complicated.
I better draw it.
And he drew a giant gantry crane, which he called a gantry.
He then went back to Washington and said, what we'd like you to do is describe what's inside the building.
Because, of course, what you've described, we already knew.
This is just a test.
Can you tell us what they're doing?
And Price then, in a subsequent trial, next day, said that they're building a giant 60-foot diameter sphere out of steel, and they're making it out of gore, sort of orange peel sections that they're welding together.
And Price said they're having trouble welding them because the metal is getting distorted.
Now, this is pretty detailed information from a psychic practitioner.
Three years later, after Price died, we then learned, or CIA learned, that in fact they were making 60-foot-diameter steel containment vessels for a particle beam weapon to shoot down the satellites that we were using to take those very pictures.
So we were able to confirm that what Price looked at was exactly the right structure, both inside and outside.
And these extraordinary accurate drawings were really a hallmark of the very best of the psychics we work with.
And you don't have to answer this because you may have direct knowledge that would make it inappropriate for you to answer.
But if you were to speculate about what laser capability, technology level we have now reached, perhaps even from orbit, what do you imagine our capabilities to be now?
The energy aspect is really so interesting in this.
We all want to control energy.
So in our first book, In Miracles of Mind, we discovered that a lot of energy, if psychic energy is available, and by golly, I can control that energy.
I can see into the distance and find my lost car keys or a parking place, or see into the future and buy silver commodities, make money in the market, or I can make coherence with another person, heal that person.
It's as though you were able to control that energy.
It's about self-improvement, and self-improvement's not bad.
Could you tell me and everybody else what it I mean, my God, here you are, a physicist working on lasers, and it's a little hard for the average person to understand how you make the transition to the mind disciplines of remote viewing.
Because one is so much hands-on hardware, and the other is so much hands-off where you can say, in a sense, it's all remote sensing.
We're remote sensing with lasers, or we're remote sensing with ESP.
But to answer your question seriously, I got interested in ESP as a college student where I was doing magic on stage.
And every magician, even the skeptical ones, will tell you that when you're on stage, you're in an ESP-conducive condition.
Your eyes are closed, and you're trying to inflow information.
Generally, you know most of it from a trick you've done.
You've deceived somebody, so you know what's on their mind.
But typically, with a trick that's called billet reading, where you'll be standing on stage pretending to read the mind of a lady in the audience.
You've already read the question that she's submitted, and you read it surreptitiously, and you know that the lady's lost her dog.
So you close your eyes, and you hold your hand to your head, and you say, there's a woman in the audience, and she's looking for a dog.
Is there somebody looking for a dog?
And the woman will stand up and say, yes, yes, I am.
And at that moment, a magician with the lights in his face and the heat of performance upon him will notice that he's also experiencing a white frame house with an apple tree in the front yard and a brick facade.
And he will then supplement his trickery by whatever images come to him.
We worked with Melbourne Christopher, the distinguished American magician.
He said, oh, yes, we're familiar with that.
And you can fold in these psychic impressions with the trick you've already done.
I was just discussing that with one of my researchers, and the survey had been done, and a majority of magicians would confirm that.
I don't know how many.
Melbourne Christopher was the magician that SLI hired to oversee their work, because SLI, even though I had a background in magic, SRI was worried that some wily person coming in would deceive us.
So we always had a magician oversee what we were doing so we were not fooled.
Because I didn't want to spend 10 years of my career and be deceived in the end.
But certainly Melbourne Christopher confirmed that.
I believe Crescent would also confirm that from his many writings.
He talks about heightened sensitivity.
So we think that this is a common experience, and it was certainly my experience that psychic information was available.
And then as a young scientist, I thought it would be much more interesting to understand genuine psychic abilities than to continue deceiving people with trickery.
It was crystal clear to me that I was receiving impressions that I had no ordinary way to accommodate.
And it was really through my magic as a young scientist, through doing stage magic, that I got interested in exploring psychic abilities.
You are familiar with many claims of psychokinetic occurrences, altergist activity, that sort of thing, things moving in the air.
Frequently, these things seem to occur, Russell, near maturing young women, young teenage girls most frequently, seem to be involved in incidents of psychokinetic occurrence.
Do you have any thoughts on that, or do you think that it's all a bunch of baloney with regard to claims made of things actually physically moved with the mind?
The sexual energy exists as an energetic force that can cause things to happen.
Now, I have no direct experience with this, so I'm always much more comfortable telling you about something I've done.
But there's a whole literature in the parapsychological field of repeated psychokinesis associated with individuals, and they're generally teenagers, boys or girls, incidentally.
Raging hormones find an outlet by breaking crockery or moving stuff around.
That's 100% not understood, incidentally.
I should say, as a physicist, when I came to Stanford after a decade at SRI, we had made great progress in understanding the psychology of psychic abilities, teaching people how to get in touch with the part of themselves that's psychic, but we had not learned a darn thing about the physics.
And since Hel Putoff and I were both physicists, that was quite disappointing.
Do you think that the abilities that we're discussing tonight are increasing with evolutionary kicks of the clock, or whether, in fact, we're in the process of more or less losing it through the distractions of the modern world?
I think that we're, well, I don't, it's a two-part question.
I think, yes, we're losing it through the distraction of the modern world.
Whether or not we have more psychic capability than the earliest Cromanian, I don't know.
Certainly, we have the capabilities available today that were manifested by the great mystics thousands of years ago.
But I think that with the noise of television and distractions and the internet, we live lives in such a way as we need never have another quiet moment.
And in order to get in touch with a part of yourself, the psychic, you absolutely must get quiet.
In the new book, in Heart of the Mind, we talk about how Carl Sagan spent his entire life searching for God.
In each of his books, he talks about the search for God that was always unsuccessful.
He turned over every rock.
And the reason this great intellect, this great astronomer, could not find God, in our opinion, is he would never be quiet.
Because I've got more I wish to ask you about Carl Sagan.
Russell Targ is here, a physicist and a very prolific author.
You can check him out on my website right now.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
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Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from September 7, 1999.
*Music*
*Music*
I see trees of green, red roses too.
I see the blue for green, and I think to myself, What a wonderful I see skies of blue brightness,
the dogs say goodbye, and I think to myself, What a wonderful world you're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time, tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from September 7th, 1999.
Or anybody who was alive in the 1960s, 1970s probably investigated marijuana.
Certainly that was not part of Sagan's general character as we knew it.
Because the interesting thing about marijuana and other drugs with regard to psychic abilities is they make people feel very psychic, but in testing their psychic ability, it doesn't actually enhance their psychic ability.
And in particular, in remote viewing, remote viewing is a kind of intellectual task in that you have to separate out your psychic noise, your imagination, And your memories.
If you ask somebody what's in the box, they'll start guessing.
You've got to surrender your judgment analysis, because analysis is what makes us so capable as human beings.
You have to quiet all of that chatter and begin to inflow the information.
And when you have given up your capabilities, whether in alcohol or marijuana or anything else, once you've begun to dampen your acuity, then you no longer can control that chatter.
So although, I mean, the joke in parapsychology research is really what I said before, is that when people are smoking marijuana, they feel psychic, but the truth is that's not a way to develop psychic abilities.
And the idea of surrendering your ego as a path to transcendence, path to experiencing something outside yourself, is the oldest spiritual treatment in the book.
As the oldest Vedas from 2,500 years before Christ, every mystic who has ever sat quietly noticed certain things.
One of the things that they noticed is that we are not separated from one another, that we have a shared consciousness, that the idea that you're your brother's keeper comes because you and your brother share some consciousness.
And the idea of surrendering ego is something that's taught in the Vedas.
It was taught in the Jewish traditions, and Jesus taught it.
All the mystics have taught this as a way of experiencing something beyond yourself.
I would have said that God is an experience that doesn't require belief.
It's an experience that's available to us all.
And in the experience that we have today, it's as though all of us are living workstations already connected up to a spiritual internet.
We have the capability of experiencing something beyond ourselves.
And that experience is one of surrender.
It's an experience of residing in love.
I mean, Jesus talked about the peace that passes understanding is the opportunity to become overwhelmed with love and recognize that there is something outside of ourselves, greater than ourselves, that's available to be experienced.
In Kabbalah, they say, in Jewish mystic tradition, in order to experience God, you've got to annihilate the ego.
And those happen to be the exact words that are used in Vedanta, where they say to experience something beyond yourself, you've got to surrender your story.
You've got to give up the story that you keep telling people about who you are and become part of something greater than who you are.
And this is not belief, that I'm not saying that you should believe anything.
the surprise is that the experience is available and does not require belief so that even is it
Well, it's possible to be certain of the presence of this loving experience, this experience beyond yourself.
You don't do that through remote viewing.
Remote viewing is not a spiritual path any more than vegetarianism is a spiritual path.
But it was my understanding that a lot of the original remote viewers and some of the latter ones began to have some disturbing spiritual experiences when they were not supposed to.
Well, remote viewing is a way of quieting your mind.
This physicist here began on a spiritual path, courtesy of the CIA.
So I was a psychic spy for the CIA and found God because the CIA paid me for a decade to sit in the dark with my eyes closed, getting my mind quiet and helping other people get in touch with their quiet mind capabilities.
Cal and I chose six people to teach remote viewing from a group of about 30 at Fort Meade.
And we chose people who had had either a great interest in psychic abilities because of their experiences or other experiences in their life that led them and us to think that they would be able to take part in that.
So of the six people that we taught, they then went on, and of course Joe McMonagall is the most famous who became, who's probably the greatest living, I've interviewed him, greatest living psychic remote viewer that we know about.
All of these people came to us and of course had never done remote viewing before, but sat in our little laboratory and we described what we thought was going on.
And many of these people did excellently.
In fact, four out of the six people that we chose were so successful that their results were independently statistically significant.
And of course, physicists get all excited about statistical significance.
I have known both the Russian and the Chinese do rather poor experiments in this arena, I should say.
I visited Russia a couple of times, and it's harder to be psychic in an unfree country than it is in a free country.
Because in order to be psychic, in order to be right, you have to be willing to be wrong.
So you can't be in an environment where you're punished for being wrong.
So that although it's certainly conceivable that the Russians and the Chinese are currently doing psychic abilities, I think the reason that this thing sprang forward is because it's just easier to be psychic in California than it is in Moscow.
It was just a more permissive environment.
We considered the tens of millions of dollars in hardware at SRI in our lobby, in our laboratories, to be a kind of permission-giving device.
We weren't using it in our research.
But people would come into the lab and see millions of dollars worth of hardware lying around.
So they would feel, we think, that SRI, this big, wealthy institution, is giving me permission to be psychic.
But more than that, it goes back to Madame Catherine that we talked about an hour ago.
If you know for a fact that this picture you're going to see is a circle, a square, or a star, and I say, oh, okay, I'm going to show you a circle or a square or a star.
What do you see?
I've created so much mental noise for you.
You now have a stored picture of those images.
So even a great psychic would have a very hard time separating out which one you're going to see.
It would be much easier to describe something of which you have no knowledge than something from a form set.
And they're more able to do that, as Ingo Swan would always say, don't trivialize my ability.
If you want me to separate my consciousness from my body, to expand my awareness, give me some worthwhile reason to do it.
Don't ask me to describe some silly picture in an envelope.
So that in all of our work at SRI and the work that Jane Catherine and I have done subsequently, we always had real three-dimensional objects that give the person a kind of reward for going to the trouble to describe them.
All right, well, here's something I've never understood about time travel and still don't.
Maybe you can help me.
It has been told to me by every remote viewer that I have interviewed that observing events or describing events in time, back in time or ahead in time, is part of what can be done.
Especially looking at things back in time is very complicated.
In a nutshell, if you describe what happened 100 years ago, nobody knows whether it's true until you verify it, of course.
So one of the places you could have gotten the information is looking backwards 100 years in time.
An easier place to get it is from the verification in your future.
So it's just very hard to tell whether somebody actually looked back in time.
But looking forward in time is very easy to verify if we decide to show you an object of a particular kind if the silver market goes up, or show you a different object if it goes down,
and nobody on earth knows what those objects could be, because silver doesn't trade until tomorrow, and you say, it looks to me like a soda bottle with a pink top, silver goes up, and we show you the target that the judge had chosen, and you get to see a soda bottle.
That target had not been chosen until the future event occurred.
So we know for a fact that the only place you could have gotten that information time after time is by looking into your future.
And as a matter of interest, in such controlled experiments, Russell, what percentage of time were the people able to discern the gold markets following days moving forward?
And we made the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and NOVA did a film about us.
The following year, I should say, our investor, who had made more than $100,000 in year one, wanted to do experiments at twice the rate, two experiments a week.
And that was faster than we were able to do an orderly protocol.
So we ran into problems simply doing the experiment at that rate, and in fact, were not successful the following year.
But just for good measure, Jane Catcher and I, in publishing Heart of the Mind, our publisher asked us, if you're telling people how to do psychic stuff, we would like you to demonstrate that you can do it.
So in our own little controlled experiments with other judges, we were successful 11 out of 12 times.
So even mild-mannered authors and scientists can be psychic when the necessity level is high enough.
I would say, Russell, instead of getting energized and wanting double, you know, which is a human thing to do, he should have moved from silver to gold and stayed with the same number of experiments.
We're going to go to the phone shortly and let you ask whatever questions you would like.
is a rare opportunity All right, very briefly, because it's kind of a setup and because it's interesting and because I think you ought to hear it, we're going to go to Florida.
And an interesting gentleman there, do you wish to give your name, sir?
And about an hour and a half ago, what did you observe?
unidentified
There was three lights up in the sky, and they were flying not like you would see airplanes, just all over the place.
The only thing that's close to it that I was going to ask you about, it might be someone could do this with lasers, but who would have lasers, you know, to shine up in the clouds, to reproduce?
That, Russell, is going to cause me to ask you what, if anything, is known about whatever in the hell is flying in our skies that are reported like this last gentleman, flashes over New Mexico that light up thousands of square miles, really weird things going on in our skies.
Has there ever been anything developed in remote viewing that tried to look at this phenomenon?
Ingo Swan has described experiences with unidentified flying objects in his book called Penetrations.
In our program, people did not see flying saucers.
Certainly, there is definitely UFO experiences.
That is, thousands or tens of thousands of people are having UFO experiences, but it's unclear what those experiences come from, whether from another dimension or from the future or from another planet.
We just don't know that.
I would say that nobody knows that yet, but it's obvious that there's some real phenomenon because thousands of people are having the experience.
You know, my problem, thank you, Caller, is it opens the doors.
I firmly believe everything you've told me, Russell, about the ability of the human mind.
The only thing I'm unfortunately kind of like Carl Sagan, I think.
And maybe I'm just not quiet enough, Russell.
But while I understand that the functionings of our human mind are certainly something we barely know about, we barely understand probably what we're ultimately capable of if we were to pursue it.
I haven't yet seen that, and I've seen quite a bit, but I haven't seen anything in that that proves to me the existence of a God.
Okay, but one might go into the woods or a prairie or a beautiful place and observe the mountains and observe every little beautiful aspect of the very intricate nature that's all around us and say that they see God in that.
And in that sense, I understand if that's what you mean by that.
And there's meditation that John Cabot-Zinn talks about, sort of straight-up meditation.
And there's a kind of Buddhist meditation that Thich Nhat Han talks about.
All of these are different schools.
The Buddhists are, of course, thousands of years old.
The Christian meditation comes from the Gnostic Christians.
But all of these are an agreement to get rid of your story, at least for the time being, and get quiet so that you have the opportunity to have the experience of experiencing something outside yourself.
The overcome with love experience that Jesus talks about is a peace that passes understanding.
And even Jews experience this in the Kabbalistic practice where they finally agree to burn up the story and annihilate the ego.
And it's a very scientific approach, Art, that is, all of these people say, if you will get quiet, if you will learn to meditate, and you will then have certain experiences, why don't you devote a little time to this?
It's like a lab experiment.
You don't have to believe anything.
Just quiet yourself, surrender your story, look for something outside of yourself, and then report back what you experience.
And historically, over thousands of years, people have the opportunity to reside in love, to be overcome with love.
And it's hard to believe this is beyond boyfriend and girlfriend.
The oceanic, well, it is a function of a living human mind, but what you experience is an oceanic feeling of connection with one another in which you are out of space and out of time.
Kabir, the mystic writer, said that he had this experience for 15 seconds and devoted the rest of his life to honoring that experience.
It's not that he was enlightened, in touch with God for his entire life, but he had a flash, an insight, a transcendent experience that changed his life.
And the reward for this kind of practice is not that we all become enlightened, but that we have occasional awake experiences where we can reside in gratitude rather than in fear.
If you can move from fear to gratitude, then you're on the way to residing in love, which is where we'd like to be, I think.
The scientific evidence is really very good that something survives.
And that's principally the evidence from even Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, who has interviewed with his assistant thousands of children.
And these children oftentimes report memories of previous lives, which they still have.
And they go to another village, and he recognizes people, shows abilities that he had in his previous lives, and quite interesting, can often identify their murderer.
And the murderers are then brought to justice and convicted based upon the circumstantial evidence that these children provide about the conditions of their death and where the implements are hidden and who killed them.
So the evidence from Stevenson's many books is very convincing to me and a lot of other people that something does survive.
Hey, would you go so far as to say that an experience of the sort that I described to you and that we just talked about a few moments ago is as close in this life as you will ever get to death?
Because that's what somebody told me after I described that experience to somebody.
They said that's as close as you're ever going to get to dying.
It certainly sounds like a kind of near-death experience.
Very often, as you know, in near-death experiences, people change their lives because they've then had a glimpse that there is something outside themselves.
And they go on what the Buddhists call the bodhisattva path, where you have now had a unit of experience with God.
You have an experience with something outside your physical body, and then you devote your life to trying to relieve suffering on the planet to help other people recognize that there is a different way of living.
Which causes somebody like myself to wonder why only some are chosen to have this sort of Christmas future look at what could be and come back and correct their lives while others wallow forward until the very end unrepentant.
I mean in general you don't find that experience unless you look for it.
If you have 100% of your attention focused on the material plane, concerned with bodies, sex, stuff, then you will unquestionably spend your time in desperation, fear, resentment, depression.
You've got to spend, in my opinion, at least half your time giving and receiving love, and then you can move to gratitude and forgiveness, reside in love, and go on to these unitive experiences.
But you have to give up the focus on the material plane, because you don't find happiness on the material plane.
And I left Lockheed because I saw so much suffering and resentment there that I felt that that was not an appropriate place for me to spend any more time because I felt that people working together must find a way to be respectful of one another so that it's possible to pursue a spiritual path.
I think people in aerospace, in the computer industry, recognize that there is something beyond this material existence because they have lives that are often meaningless, often desperate, filled with fear and resentment.
And I live here in Silicon Valley, and the original subtitle of our book was How to Find God in Silicon Valley.
Is it possible to have a peaceful life surrounded by restaurants and technology?
And the answer is you have to start surrendering something to get out of the material plane, to experience gratitude for our incredible good fortune to be alive in America and have health and intelligence.
And it's my experience that I work in a technology company right now.
And it's my experience that people are aware that there is something beyond the material plane and they would like to find meaning to their lives.
It is a very unusual opportunity for you to ask somebody of his caliber whatever you would like.
I'm Art Bell and this is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from September 7, 1999.
So you think, King of Romeo, playing a party in a picture show, we'll take the love and wait home.
King of Romeo, playing a party in a picture show, we'll take the love and wait home.
Thank you.
Tell me the home Twitter Be it sight,
sand, smell, touch, there's something inside that we need so much.
The sight of a touch or the scent of the sand, or the strength of an oak roots deep in the ground.
The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing.
To lie in the meadow and hear the grass sing, all these things in our memories all when the youth come straight
for me, take my life upon me if I behold.
But I know, I know, I should have grown But I know, I know, I should have grown You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from September 7th, 1999.
One from Art in Lakeland, Florida, listening to WFLA, who asks, if you, Russell, or any remote viewer, can predict the market, then why are you not as rich as Bill Gates?
But the surprising thing that happens is that as you get increasingly in touch with your psychic abilities and your internal processes and something outside yourself, and you begin to live with an expanded awareness, using this ability to enrich yourself no longer seems like an interesting thing to do.
I once watched an interview with Ted Turner, you know, who owns Turner Broadcasting Baseball Teams and is married to Gene Fonda and CNN and all that stuff, right?
Probably one of the richest guys in America.
And I think it was a pinnacle.
It may have been a CNN interview.
Anyway, they asked him what it's like to have all of that.
In other words, they are one of the few who has followed the economic rainbow to the pot at the end, and they've got the pot, and now they're saying, hmm, what else is there?
They say that when people are lost in an underground cavern with no light or sound as input, the brain begins to rewire itself, starting to look for more input, which eventually then obviously drives them insane.
Yes, but what he did say was interesting, And that was that these people would begin to develop ways of retaining their sanity, kind of like the pilots at Hanoi Hilton did, playing little mind games and all the rest of it, and developing this and that within the mind to remain sane.
unidentified
Uh-huh.
What I'm wondering is that is it linked possibly to psychic abilities?
You had said something earlier about people are not quiet enough to notice their psychic abilities.
Well, one of the interesting things is that the worst punishment that a jailer can do is put you into solitary confinement because your mind is clamoring for stimulation.
On the other hand, in Northern California, people will pay thousands of dollars to be in an unstimulated environment.
They call it a silent retreat.
And it depends what you're expecting and what you're prepared to deal with.
If you're a meditator and you're thrown into solitary confinement, that's an opportunity for spiritual growth to deal with something beyond yourself because you have some tools to deal with your chattering mind.
So then a meditator would likely remain sane while the possibility of somebody else in that environment for too protracted a period of time would be to lose touch with you, I guess.
They do give you information from the future because when you're dreaming, you have really surrendered control over your mental processes.
You're open to outside stimulation, to outside signals that come in, to outside connections.
So in your dreams, you're able to experience being connected with things in the distance and things in the future.
And precognitive dreams are the most common kind of psychic phenomena that people experience in their lives.
Where you have a dream of something of unusual clarity or unusual bizarreness, you can learn to recognize those dreams that are brought to you by the future and those dreams that are anxiety or wish fulfillment.
For example, if you dream about failing an examination that's coming up and you haven't studied for it, that would not be precognition.
That would be just the anxiety you feel about taking the exam you haven't studied for.
But if you dream about something really remarkable and surprising, and then that occurs the next day, we would say that's a precognitive dream where the future affected you at an earlier time.
For example, intuition is partly psychic ability, partly glimpsing the future, and partly the sum total of everything you've learned in your subconscious processes and have forgotten.
So it's a mixture of psychic abilities and subconscious processes.
There have been a few times in my life that I have ignored strong intuitive feelings about what I should do, and inevitably it has worked out very poorly when I ignored the inner voice.
Well, we're investigating inner voices, and in fact, right now we're looking for identical twins, especially twins who would like to communicate with each other psychically.
So if there are any twins listening who'd like to take part in ESP experiments where they can get in touch with their psychic abilities, I'd like them to send an email to me, Russell, at ESPresearch.com.
One is there's a tremendous amount of stories of identical twins having shared dreams, for example, where they will come down for breakfast and want to tell their father about the dream that they had together that night.
Or twins that are reared apart and then meet for the first time wearing the same clothes, the same number of rings, the same dress, same occupation.
So the evidence is really quite good that there is some kind of retained connection between the twins.
Now the model that's far-fetched, but certainly comes to mind, is from modern physics, where you've probably heard that we live in a non-local universe, that everything is connected to everything else, just as the mystics said thousands of years ago.
But in particular, the experiments that are interesting, the hot new field in modern physics, is these experiments in quantum interconnectedness, where electrons or photons are particles that are created together, twin particles, are then separated, yet the particles which are now separated from each other, if you do something to one of the particles, the other one knows it, even though they're traveling away from each other at the speed of light.
So Einstein first talked about this and called it a spooky telepathic connection and didn't Think it would occur.
But we now see in the physical laboratory that these twin particles remain connected after they're separated.
So identical twins are genetically the same.
They have the same DNA, same atoms and molecules.
And it may be by analogy or maybe even more than analogy that these warm meat and potatoes people who are separated still retain the original single-state connection and might, with a little help, develop really excellent psychic abilities under their control.
The gift that the remote viewers get, that they take away from my laboratory, is they actually get to incorporate psychic abilities in their lives.
No, I think any kind of person can wind up being a twin.
It just depends on whether the egg is divided in the early stages of fertilization.
You can get twins of every conceivable description.
But the identical twins do appear to have a psychic connection with each other, and we would like to explore that.
Payoff for us is that we can begin to determine what are the variables that affect the SP.
Payoff for the twins is that they can get in touch with the part of themselves that's psychic, which people seem to like very much and incorporate into their lives.
Do you wonder, Russell, when they've unraveled the entire human genome, which they're well on the way to doing, whether they will eventually discover there actually is a genetic point they can identify or place they can identify, you know, who knows, chromosome number such and such at the end of some gene, that is responsible for psychic ability.
Well, it appears that everybody has psychic abilities to some extent.
We have not found where that resides yet.
We think the explanation is probably something we don't understand about the space-time in which we live, that we're actually connected to one another, rather than a psychic signal that's sent from you to me.
What the mystics have said, what the real psychics have said, is that the reason you're able to describe what's off in the distance is that it's not actually distant.
It's not that we misunderstand the waves, but rather we misunderstand what we mean by distance.
The Heart of the Mind tells you how to expand your awareness and incorporate psychic abilities into your life.
Our first book, Miracles of Mind, which is out in paperback now, is more of a teaching book that gives step-by-step instructions on how to develop psychic abilities.
So you could say, Miracles of Mind, which deals with the CIA psychic spying, tells you that there's energy available, you can incorporate it into your lives, you can control it.
The new book, Heart of the Mind, explains why you would want to bother doing such a thing and what to do with it to enrich your life.
Because in order to include psychic abilities into your life, it requires a degree of surrender and naturalness and recognition that we're connected to one another and these abilities are shared with all your brothers and sisters.
In my earlier life, Russell, I was about as psychic as a brick.
And I spent a lot of time chasing women and radios and hobbies and stuff and stuff, you know, stuff.
Earthly stuff.
And it's kind of funny because I never had any psychic experiences when I was young.
And as I grew older, and I began to do the program I'm doing now, dealing with people like you, Russell, all the time, things began to happen to me.
And that almost suggests to me that the consideration of what you and I are talking about right now, even the mere consideration of it and contemplation of it, makes it more likely.
Remote viewing is just another more controlled form of natural psychic ability.
There are some wonderful psychics who do help the police.
And remote viewing is just a catch-all that includes precognition of the future events, clairvoyant connection with the event as it is, and a mind-to-mind connection with people who know the answer.
Remote viewing is a combination that we help put together in our experiments to give us the greatest likelihood of success in an attempt to understand the phenomena.
Okay, and the other thing is, you know, if you remote view these things, and could it be dangerous to your psyche taking in all this, some of these negative views?
I think probably it would be dangerous in the same way if you spend the whole day watching news television where you fill your day with bombings and airplane crashes and accidents.
That's hazardous to your health, and so is spending your day psychically viewing murders and other and kidnappings.
You don't want to fill your mind space with violent activities.
Hella Hammett, who's one of our great psychics and very sensitive, beautiful person, was called on to help solve a murder, and she just didn't want to do it.
She just called me up and said, they're in the middle of this case.
Can you help Russell?
And I, in fact, just talking to her, visualized the scene and saw a very usual thing.
I saw somebody that appeared to be taking his hair off.
I saw a guy just suddenly remove all of his hair.
And, of course, I realized that he had totally pulled off a wig.
So I just said, that's what I get.
This looks like a crime committed by a bald guy wearing a full wig.
And as things revolved, that turned out to be the right answer.
This is really, I just tuned in on the thing that Hella was looking at, and I got another piece of information between us.
I have a comment and a question for you, if possible.
I became aware of my psychic abilities about the age of 14, and I'm 33 now.
I consider them to be gifts.
And for about the last five or six years, I've been using these abilities to give readings over the phone or in my home or in other people's homes in a positive way, most positive way I can do this.
And my question to you is, without sounding too selfish, how is it that I can help other people and with 80 to 90 percent accuracy, but when it comes to trying to channel myself or in that positive sense, I cannot do that?
In that you're all wrapped up with too much information about with the diagnosis, for example, or the advice.
If it's yourself, you're wrapped up with too much information, in my opinion.
Or in the case of a healer, the healer who is herself ill is then out of balance herself, so is not able to be coherent with the world outside herself to bring in healing for herself.
Because healing is a kind of balancing activity that the healer does.
If you're out of balance to start with yourself, it's hard to do.
But in the case of giving yourself information, you're then overloaded with all your guesses and surmises and problems that just create mental annoying.
You know too much.
unidentified
Okay.
You know, that's so unfair in a way.
But the gift of healing, I have that as well.
And I absolutely agree with you.
And as far as the lottery or anything like that, I try not to even suggest to other people, you know, pick this number, pick that number, pick that number, or even myself.
Well, I'm, of course, a facilitator and not a psychic.
My concern with Ed Daines is that his Psytech operation and the people I've talked to say they're 100% accurate, but I've never seen any data from them about their psychic predictions at all.
And in my experience, even with the very best remote viewers that we know of, we don't have anything like 100% accuracy.
If we had 100% accuracy, then by now we'd have figured out how this all works.
We tend to get two-thirds of the time we can match up what a person says, and only about a quarter of the time do we have the photographic accuracy that makes remote viewing so exciting.
When you use a team of remote viewers independently working on the same thing, and you come up with a similar result in a very high percentage of those that you're tasking, does the percentage or accuracy rise?
In our silver forecasting experiments, we tended to use, or we always used, different target pairs for different people because when you use the same target, if you ask a whole bunch of people, for example, what's the picture in the envelope, they may agree or they may describe altogether some other picture.
So you might get the most powerful psychic pulling the whole group to erroneously describe something that's an error.
So it is not always so successful to have a group of people all working on the same target.
In the work that Stephen Schwartz did with the Mobius Society doing psychic archaeology, he would get different pieces from different people, and that was often very helpful.
When you were talking about the different kinds of meditation, the Buddhist and the Christian and on and on, I was holding in my hand a book called Jewish Meditation, which I was really surprised about, kind of a coincidence.
But I was wondering, when you talk about the ego, you have to put the ego aside and you just make a decision to do that.
And the first step, the way you start, is really the difference that I was talking about before.
It's the difference between self-improvement and self-realization.
There's a whole theme of our book that we've been talking about, The Heart of the Mind, which is about self-realization and transcendence, whereas our first book is about remote viewing and gaining power.
But the steps that you take is a step from fear and resentment, where we often reside, and to wake up in the morning in gratitude.
It's like taking the first step, and you ask how you do that surrender.
You wake up in the morning and put your little paws on top of the coverlet, and you can either fall into your ordinary path of fear and depression, or you can wake up and say, thank you, universe, for my intelligence, that I live in America, that I'm alive and healthy, that I woke up at all.
So if you can wake up in gratitude, recognizing that your great good fortune is not something that you did at all, but was given to you, as of course, what the Christians call grace.
It's an unasked for, undeserved gift from God or from the universe.
If you can just wake up in the morning in gratitude, that's a first step toward recognizing that you've been given gifts that are outside of anything that your little ego did by itself.
When he's been talking about these spiritual principles and precepts, I was just wondering, Russell, have you ever read Chapter 5 in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous?
I'm familiar with the book, of course, but I have not read the AA book.
But I'm aware that a lot of these teachings are similar.
unidentified
They're identical.
And it almost seems like they're taken verbatim out of that book.
And I'm not trying to suggest anything other than the fact that it would probably be appropriate, if they are, to give credit to the author who actually wrote them.
Well, either that or you have to imagine, since these techniques have been available for so long, that that author might want to give credit to the ancients.
First time caller line, you're on the air without a lot of time, and Russell Targ here.
unidentified
Hi.
Hi, this is Jim in Portland listening to KEX.
Hi doing the sublime intersection of spirituality and science.
You were talking about Carl Sagan earlier, and something hit me.
Instead of when people are trying to receive something, I mean the message, the remote viewer, it's almost like you're better off with that little passive crystal radio set that doesn't plug into anything rather than the high-powered radio set that plugs into something.
I mean, except you're talking about the human brain or the human.
I guess my question was comparing the remote reviewer receiver to like a radio receiver.
And in radio, I guess there's an inherent energy in the wave, and it used to have these little crystal sets.
Didn't run on any batteries or electrical power, and it could pick up the signal.
And I remember him talking about Carl Sagan.
Not quiet enough, you know, and I'm thinking with high-powered intellect, maybe the simple crystal set works better than the high-powered electronic radio set.
I'm groping for an analogy, but I was wondering if you thought that was onto something.
If Sagan is out there trying to understand the workings of the cosmos, his powerful intellect is just the right way to do it.
If he's trying to experience something that's ephemeral, trying to become one with the universe or to fill his life with love, that does not require a lot of intellect, requires some surrender of control in order to experience what's out there and what's available.
Love is a place to reside, a way to fill your life rather than something to do.
The love that the mystics talk about, that fills your life, that overwhelms your being, is not love of a boyfriend or girlfriend or love of an object.
It's the experience of indwelling love that's available.
It's the love that Jesus talked about as the peace that passes understanding.
And interestingly, mystics of every religious persuasion have described in similar terms.
unidentified
Hey, Ark, could you give your tapes telephone number for how to get tapes?
Yeah, I believe there is about to be quiet to know.
But it really is easier said than done.
And I know it's pretty easy to sit here and talk about the surrendering of the ego and a lot harder to actually do.
And it's kind of like I joked earlier, you said you've got to wake up and say something like, well, thank you, or I'm glad to be alive, or isn't it a great day, or whatever, to start you out in a positive way.
I think as you get quiet and pursue self-inquiry, what you notice is that there is more to a person than the story, than how they were brought up or what they do for a living.
For example, when you stop doing for a living what you do, for example, I'm a physicist and I say, one day I'll quit being a physicist.
I don't drop out of existence.
I hope that there's something left.
And you want to find out what's at that core, what's inside, what is that consciousness that remains.
And that's called self-inquiry.
And it's the oldest spiritual discipline in the book.
And if Professor Targ, first I want to thank you for making yourself available in this way.
I am very interested and have good reason to give credibility to the Native American ability to, in many tribes, to apparently project the personality out of the body and then appear to others for good or ill purposes in an animal form.
Have you had any experience or any thoughts on that kind of thing?
In the yogi tradition, that's a frequent occurrence.
Just to tell a story, the greatest proponent of Vedanta in our time, a man named Punja, was a worker, he was a geologist, meditating and meditating.
And then a man appeared to him, came to his house, and said, there's a great teacher up in the mountains.
The man you're looking for is up in the mountains.
And the visitor was so persuasive that Punja set aside his geology and went up to this mountain and climbed the mountain and got to that place in Arunachala.
And who's sitting there was the guy who just came to his house.
He said, what a faker you are.
You came down to trick me.
And everybody attested that this man had not left the place he was sitting for 20 years, but he had projected himself, the story goes, to the home of this devotee who was ready to be awakened.
So I think that that's the kind of projection you're describing.
And that's a frequent feature in the yogi literature.
I believe that Jesus was one of the realized masters like Buddha and some of the other Hindu masters that we know about, people who walked with God, whose everyday, wide-awake, awakened experience was one of living in love.
I believe that he was a teacher and a mystic and a rabbi and all of those things.
I believe that Jesus and Buddha and Shankara and some of the others were human beings who are just some of the more recent Hindu masters are human beings who are self-realized.
Ramana Maharshi is the one I was going to name, who's really an Einstein of spirituality.
He's the greatest.
He died in the 50s, and he's described as the Einstein of spirituality because he wants you to believe nothing.
He describes simply the geometry of consciousness, how it works, what you experience, and how to reside in love and become realized without any belief at all.
See, scientific process, try this and report back what you experience.
We have now published many papers in the most prestigious journals in the world showing that psychic functioning with experienced viewers tends to run two-thirds of the time you get the right answer.
And Randy doesn't want to lose his million dollars.
He wants it 100% or nothing.
So we have nothing very much to say to each other.
All my life I've been trying to combine the spiritual and the scientific.
And I'm at a point now where I call myself a techno-shaman, maybe much like Mr. Targ.
And I will sit back and clear my mind and just let knowledge come to me, but I can do it with a goal in mind.
And one of the things that came to me this way was that we could turn the sun itself into a laser to eliminate asteroid threats and various other things like that because it's a bunch of excited gas, much like in a helium-neon laser.
He described a kind of sun-pumped laser before there were any lasers at all, which we all thought was quite remarkable when the first sun-pumped laser.
He envisioned the sun coming into a crystal and a beam of pure light coming out the other end, which indeed has now been done.
unidentified
But that's very indirect.
I mean, why not just use the laser, I mean, the sun itself as the lasing medium?
A laser, remarkable property of the laser is that the light does not diverge.
It can bring all of the energy to bear upon something.
The sun is homogeneously spread all over the universe.
unidentified
I understand that.
I just mean, you know, like if you had two mirrors set up in orbit around the sun so that the line that's right between them grazed the surface of the sun.
Seems like you might be able to set up a thing basically.
The Vedic tradition talks about intelligent life forms on other planets, galaxies, and dimensions.
Have you or anyone you know done any reliable work with regards to remote viewing as to intelligent life forms on other planets, galaxies, or dimensions and their interreaction with humanity and Earth?
I have not found any intelligent life on other planets, though Ingo Swann did describe magnetic fields around the planet Jupiter, together with rings around Jupiter, which at the time he described it was entirely unknown, and it was not confirmed until A year later, with a pioneer flyby.
So Ingo was able to cast to focus his attention off the planet, but we didn't find any intelligent life.
So he did show you can do remote viewing over interplanetary distances.
Hella Hambott was very sensitive to other people's attention.
And Jane Catcher, the powerful healer, has made her presence known to me when she was thinking about me.
And in fact, there's a kind of continuum of remote viewing from the mild-mannered remote viewing that we do in the laboratory, where you visualize something on your mental television screen, as it were, to the out-of-body experience where you bring your emotionality, sensitivity, sexuality to interact with somebody at a distant place.
And in that case, the person at the distant place is definitely aware that you're present.
So we bring the sex on the astral plane to the last few minutes of the show.
But that kind of distant interaction has been widely written about.
It's interesting you're talking about the Russian program because I had a chance to study with Vladimir Maximov.
He was director at the Center for Holistic Medicine in the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
He lives in New York now, and he taught me and a lot of others some interesting techniques where you can use your hands to create a holographic image of whatever you want to view.
And then you get the information through your hands, and you take the mind out of the process.
Although the mind is, you know, you're getting impressions in the mind.
No, I know that in the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Akadem Gorodov in Soviet Siberia, they were interested in sending bacterial infections from one place to another by sending light through one infected cell to infect a distant cell.
The distant transmission of illness by electromagnetic means.
I don't know about the...
unidentified
Yeah, right.
Also learned how to put healing energy on videotape.
And you can actually hold up your hands and feel the energy come off the, you know, the TV set.
I understand there's some experimentation going on now in which it's actually possible to send a photograph of yourself sitting in front of your monitor.