thinking aloud conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery
with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove hello and welcome I'm Jeff Mishlove this is
part two of our two-part series on training remote viewing with dr. paul
smith who is a founder and past president of the international remote
viewing association Paul participated in the military remote viewing program for
seven years he's a former army intelligence officer
as well as a philosopher and is the author of reading the enemy's mind and
the essential guide to remote viewing welcome again Paul thank you it's a
pleasure to be with you in the first part of our two-part series we talked
about a lot of things but essentially we covered stages 1 and stage 2 of the
remote viewing training process it's a it's a six stage program that you went
through over a period of many years I'm under the impression that these days the training has become accelerated it
doesn't need to take many years the way it once did right in fact it probably
didn't need to take many years back then many is in well actually many months is
probably a better term of the six stage process it took us a full year to get through the first three with an Ingo
Swan that there was a number of reasons for that one was that we just had a lot
of administrative military administrative issues going on there's
some question about the survival of the program we had a lot of dealings with
general officers and stuff we had to worry about and so we had gaps in our
training mm-hm but the other process part of it was that inko had this philosophy legitimate
turns out that you needed to have spaced learning you needed to
have an intense learning experience and then back off and do something else for
a while give yourself time to digest exactly absorb assimilate everything
exactly in fact those are the terms of used assimilate was a big one for him
you were assimilating what you are which are learning experiencing the only thing is that this was very early in the
process and so he didn't know how long that absorption process had to last and
so it wasn't unusual for you for you to go in to do some training do a session
in the morning do really well on that session and Ingo tell you not to come
back for the rest of the day because you were going to assimilate that that
extreme he also wanted you to leave feeling confident yes successful quit on
a high was another of his mantras essentially you quit on a high you could
you can fail 15 times but as soon as you got that one hit then he wants you to
stop there and and he I think he got this idea from sports training which was
exploring the same idea at the time it turns out to be very legitimate in
fact his idea of space learning really just in the last maybe decade has become
very popular in in foreign language training and some of these other and
land music training as well where you instead of spent hours and hours and
hours doing this rope process over and over again
you spend a amount of time working on whatever skillet is relatively short
amount I'm say say 15 minutes or whatever 20 minutes and then you go away
and do something else and you come back do another 15 or 20 minutes you go and
do something else it's been shown that you retain what you've learned of that
skill significantly better if you do this space learning then if you have
done the old wrote wrote you know bludgeon blunt instrument kind of
approach to well is it your belief that remote viewing is a skill akin to
language or music that can be trained in much the same way it's absolutely the
same in that respect I know not everybody thinks so yes there
are there are people argue this is just something you can do or you can't but like language we all have the innate
ability to speak a language but when we're born we don't we have to learn to
speak whatever our native tongue is but we can only learn to do that because we
already have the ability born into us they say when you're training animals to
do tricks right that you can't train an animal to do a trick that
doesn't have some antecedent in its normal behavioral patterns the same
thing is true with this the SR I research Stanford Research Institute
research showed that there's a very widespread ability the population probably universal or as close to
universal as you can get because we're talking about the nature of human
consciousness Eltham Utley and all humans have consciousness or some kind
right so exactly and but the thing is that you have the raw material you don't
necessarily then have the skill to take advantage of that raw material and so
that's what remote viewing is what we're doing with remote viewing training now
the kind of training that we're talking about here the six stage processes is
formally known as controlled remote viewing yes there's other varieties and
I talk about generic remote viewing for want of a better term because no other term has been coined for it and that's
the folks who just kind of learn at trial and error they just sort of
learned it on their own and you can learn about doing that way I
mean the early remote viewers that's how they learned it but this is more of a
codified structured approach that that seems to help people learn it more
quickly and more consistently than just the old trial and error kind of event
well you sometimes hear the phrase military-grade remote viewing as if it
implies well of something very serious in terms of its purpose and and the
desired results yes we like to joke military-grade you know was was provided
by the lowest bidder right but there's also milspec you know
military specifications and in some degree that does give a quality because
when you talk about for example milspec weapons mm-hmm they've got to function yeah they absolutely have to function
and so to some degree military grade can indicate you have that there's an
advantage that there's something valuable and of course the blessing of all of this the way the program ended
and all that is that now the whole civilian world can have access to that
military great approach to consciousness and cut you applied consciousness essentially well and that's what you do
you you train that based on the training you've been through I might be worth
mentioning right now how you would distinguish between a remote viewer and
a psychic yeah that's a little bit of it's almost like trying to tell where
red and purple are differentiated on the on the color spectrum right huh it just
sort of becomes routers or it becomes purple and there's no clear distinction
but generally speaking I guess you could say a remote view or someone who has an
actual studied technique and the core of the technique is distinguishing mental
noise from the signal that really is kind of the foundational element of the
remote viewing process that that Ingo Swann and how put-off developed and it's
fairly typical even the whole remote viewing program at at s RI is that the
recognition that there is this issue of mental noise mm-hm
most I I don't use this term pejorative liberals Gordan guard variety psychics
peacefully just spontaneously start being psychic or or have their own
little approach to how to learn that most of those folks particularly earlier
before we even came on scene didn't really recognize the distinction between mental noise and n signal yeah and so
you that's why you often find psyches being relatively unreliable sometimes
they do really dynamite job other times they be completely out of the ballpark
and and they themselves probably didn't really know why or how that happened
and I'm seeing generalities here obviously there's some remote viewers
have some of the same issues they do but at least they recognize that that that
this middle noise thing is the contributor and we understand somewhat
the cause of it and we also understand somewhat how you can deal with it now
now not all remote viewers learn it properly and so you know some of these
remote users are learnt through osmosis if you are whether we don't learn
whatever means and don't have a formal approach to it and they sort of vaguely
have this idea of meth noise but they really don't know how to deal with it
and so you'll find them having many of the same issues as a standard psychic
might and I want to add here that there are psychics who actually figured this
out you know and those folks are actually can be very good now I would have distinguished between a remote
viewer and a psychic this way I would say remote viewers are always looking at physical targets that can be verified
yes in principle can be verified whereas many psychics are looking at non
physical things and reporting where there's no opportunity for clear
verification of its past lives spirit guides the nature of your aura yes things of that sort those are all
metaphysical entities that can be a distinction but I would say that's
someone between some psychics and then remote viewers because there are some
psychics who are very much more grounded and yeah there's some who specialized in
law enforcement work exactly and they're remote viewers who do the same get into
esoteric so remote viewers to get into esoteric so one very popular thing early
on partly due to who that some of the people who introduced remote viewing to
the public they were also interested in UFOs and so they want to use remote
viewing to explore UFOs I like to joke that using one mystery to explore
another it's not a joke I think it's one of the tragedies and many
of our viewers are probably thinking right now well if the program was so
successful why did the military drop it assuming that they have I assume they
have to you yes pretty much I say there's 90% chance that the military is
not doing it you know 10% chance that they might be right or not just military but the intelligence is yes and I could
be wrong you probably know much better than I is that the effort to use one mystery to solve another as yeah as you
put it was the death knell of the program well now there were actually
other reasons because that really didn't become very prominent until after an
immersion of the civilian world yeah but you can see the undeniable attraction of
one who use this to try and resolve some of these other mysteries these xenobiology I guess this cryptozoology
they call it right cryptozoology of UFOs that kind of thing is because other
means are satisfactory are not producing satisfactory results well let's use this
that seems to be unhampered by the same limitations of other information
developing means yeah the problem is that that we get into then the psychic
ground right because then you're going against targets missions assignments whatever that you can't verify mm-hmm
you can develop this information but because a certain percentage of remote
viewing no matter what have a bit of fantasy in
them you can't know whether this result you come up with this fantasy or whether
it's real because you can't verify it I tend to state like all these esoteric
targets or anomaly targets like I use those interchange what you think and I
know I recommend that the other people stay away from it I myself try and say
we're way from it although haven't been completely successful because a remote
viewer has to be blind to the target if you have a tester that's absolutely
determined to get you to a UFO target you may end up doing one even without
wanting to so typically these days I gather instead of giving you map coordinates you might be just given a
number say this is target number 1735 describe it you do something along
those lines I like to to use the example of 8 6 7-5
how's it go eight six seven five three oh nine which is actually a long time yes I recall yes yeah essentially we
have a number we attach to the intent of the tart which is a tenth of the task so
for example if the if it let's say it's a training session and the eiffel tower
that the task or the treat teacher wants you to remote view the eiffel tower then
I'm going to tell you remote view the eiffel tower as you get all that mental
noise right so they'll give you eight six seven five three oh nine and that
they have independently attached to the intent you describe the Eiffel Tower
there's an envelope somewhere with that number on it and inside the sealed
envelope is a picture of the Eiffel Tower or something yeah so I like to say
remote view recipe psychic in two different ways right the first one is
the obvious one they have to actually develop information about the target to
which they have no sensory or technical connection right the other way is they
have to find out what the target is in the first place this is so you know there's speculation here but maybe
there's a lil amount of telepathy there that they're picking up from the task or what it is that they're supposed to do
or whether some remote viewing deliberately puts an element of telepathy into it if you have an
outbound experimenter who's there at the target during the experiment there is a
potential for telepathy but the way an outbound or experiment is designed its
goal is to avoid telepathy and focus on the clairvoyant aspects other remote
viewing so for example well exactly we also call them not just out better but
beacon experiments as an alternative Ian yes what you're doing is using that person to pinpoint the target and then
what you're doing is you're homing in on the person with your content with your
unconscious perception and then you're using that just as as a way of accessing
it consciously and then you explore the target and there's reason to believe
that that's what was going on because oftentimes remote viewers a report on
things that the people at the target had no awareness of and could not have had
aware and so at the very least if there was
two opposite going on that part couldn't have been telling right okay well and
there's no way to rule out various psychic gifts that might be contributing
it could be precognition retrocognition telepathy clairvoyance out-of-body
experience all of those things might be part of the process for all we know
which is actually why a lot of folks now kind of try and avoid all of that talk
you get ed Mae who will talk about the anomalous cognition and may being
another researcher Serena's involved at SSRI and later on at another research
institute that actively you receive government funding for remote viewing
you get other folks like Russell Targ who is one of the SSRI researchers and
Steve well Stephen Schwartz is a kind of an independent researcher uh both of
them like to use the term non-local perception yes and at least you're not
committing yourself to something that you can't actually know for sure which
way it goes by doing that it's kind of like the term psy itself the psi you
know well I think sure Pia scientists want to be free from theoretical baggage
and I think also from some of the controversies that surround older words
psychic clairvoyance epi people are ready for mental pictures that are not
always positive and that's and even if they were positive they may not be right
so that's always an issue you always have baggage with terminology yeah well
let's talk a little bit about stage three yes
so once you've had this sensory connection that you get in stage two you
describe the target and sensory terms you start kind of getting a feel for the
dimensionality the target how it is in physical space is it tall is that wide is it dances at hollow those kinds of
ideas and then when you merge into stage three you actually start making sketches
of the target so here's where this kinesthetic sense in a way comes in
because I like to talk about sketching as your right brain bypassing your left
brain which does all this analysis and interpretation
talking directly to your hand because in a way you've heard about heard of
automatic writing is in remote viewing quite frequently the sketching
experience is kind of like automatic sketching where you start moving your
pan around and you're feeling where the lines ought to go but you don't know
consciously why you're putting those lines there now that's not always the
case sometimes you do have a kind of a concept of what if the thing looks like
and you're sketching that but oftentimes you'll be going along as they no that's
not right it's got to go over here like this or whatever you don't have any read
any conscious reason why you do that but you just have this inner experience that
says something's not going right here I got to adjust the sketch in this way so
in stage three you're trying to represent the target or some aspect of
the target sometimes you get the whole thing I mean I've done some remote
viewing sessions where just a remarkable depiction of the target as have other
viewers yes Joe mcmoneagle is famous he's of course one of the early remote
viewers as well who just is an astonishing success very detailed
earrings that turn out to be accurate yes he's really good but it may be you
know the entire thing sometimes you get a sketch or just part of it so for
example it's the Eiffel Tower you might draw a representation of the entire
Tower but you also might just get some Criss crossing elements because that's
what come through to you yeah most prominently so then we move on to
staging or mm-hmm of course um this is where people often think about the more
like being psychic because in this stage you get what technically we call what do
we call well abstract and and abstract and concrete complex terminology so for
example again I use the Eiffel Tower as an example because I don't have it in my
target base I will never have a student that gets the Eiffel Tower for me so
that they aren't can sit there think well when is he going to give me the
Eiffel Tower so if the target rifle tower in stage
one you'd identify it as a structure and stage two you'd say it's tall black
metallic cold rusty food smells whatever right in stage three you do a general sketch of
it and stage 4 you start perceiving things like tourism national pride
foreign you might even get French right monumental park like setting people come
here to visit the ambience the ambience see how you get on beyond ant but also factual stuff really well and of and but
these are more detailed more abstract concepts and you can build up then now a really kind of substantive idea about
what this place is you still unlike you might name it
Eiffel Tower but generally speaking you're unlikely to do that because
you're getting a descriptive concept of it you get all that down and essentially
that stage for is getting this more detailed kind of amazing is to do that
by reporting your raw impressions as much as possible and avoiding analytical
overlay yes and a little overly being the left brain interpretation of
inadequate information we've all had that experience where we have bits of
information about something and we jump to a conclusion about it and turn out it turns out we're wrong yeah that's a
major component of mental noise is our left brain whose job it is to interpret
information that comes in operating on it such a way that gives you the wrong
answer to it and it happens all the time yeah it even happens in real life I like
to use these remote viewing metaphors right we have all kinds of analytical
overlaying everyday live do indeed we do so I guess let's talk now about stage 5
stage 5 is interesting and that it actually isn't what we say it's not on signaling you're actually technically
not being psychic in stage 5 mmm-hmm without getting too complicated the
point of stage 5 is actually mine data that has been dumped in here unconscious
or subconscious however you wanna call that's their sorry resident there but
hasn't yet popped up into consciousness as you go and you can extract that that
information and expand your understanding of what's what this target
is about mm-hmm but it's not an intellectual process it is verges on it it's it's you have to be very careful
with Stage five because you may start tempting the left brain to jump into this and so you have to learn this
process and be very careful about it or you're likely to start generating more
noise yeah and and it's it's like we don't you don't do it in every session
that you do it's a tool essentially that you can employ if you say so if you get
a concept in stage four that you feel like there's more behind that concept so
for example let's say you say tourism in stage four you know get the impression
of tourism well you can go into stage five and what we call stage five tourism
right or tourism and get things like cameras visitors Bermuda shorts
sightseeing you know these kind of things that all combine to to cause you
to have the concept of tourism at a more of a meta level and you can get down and
get the micro details of why you said tourism in this stage okay so you're
accumulating more and more information about the target at each stage so when you get to what essentially is the
culmination of this process you can get into Stage six which if you've seen
Close Encounters of the Third Kind yes where Richard Dreyfuss is making a
devil's tower out of mashed potatoes yeah the dining room table right right
that's essentially stage six right in stage six you can make a
three-dimensional model of the target now the goal the primary goal is to make
the model the model is another tool to help develop more information about the
target as you're engaged in this kinesthetic model making process the
hope is that will free up more information you're using a clay is that
well you can use mashed potatoes if you want but
we generally used at Fort Meade we used modeling compound which is a form of
clay I in my classes I use sculpey because it's a it's less messy than clay
is but I've since come across this new material which I have to track down that
seems to be a little bit more malleable and less messy you know I'm always
looking for a better product to do this with right but in any case you're
getting involved kinesthetically yes using your hands and you're feeling it's
bringing in other parts of your own body mind nervous system and and the
kinesthetic process is actually a sensory process of sorts that works two
ways it can put information into your system but you can also bring
information out if you think about it long handwriting is a kinesthetic
process right it's both cognitively and kinesthetically connected same thing
with verbalizing there's kinesthetics involved in actually verbalizing words
and in our sketching and sculpting is a very non verbal kinesthetic information
producing process you can you can show people what you're feeling what you're experiencing by how you depict it
through your motor processes you know interaction or your muscles and such in
which leaves a record behind well we have a few minutes left we've described
the six stages of the classical controlled remote viewing training we've
talked a bit about your past as a member of the military intelligence remote
viewing program let me ask you in closing what are your thoughts about the
future of remote viewing well I have two thoughts about it
one is that it's it's virtually unlimited there's a lot of things you
can do remote viewing and we can find out about it and then we actually do
with it that we haven't even touched yet
the other thought is that it's going to be difficult to do that because we have
a cultural mindset that makes that makes a lot of people resistant to this now there are obviously quite a few people
who are interested in it and we reach out to those folks but we and you yourself know having been involved in
parapsychology for many decades now I don't want to date you or anything but
support for parapsychology research in the United States has declined
dramatically in recent years it's like it's like mainstream science and the skeptical community have succeeded in
convincing everybody that there's nothing to it mm-hmm
and that somehow you know you you get painted with this very nasty brush if
you're going to engage in it and so you don't get funding laboratories won't
touch it which is very unfortunate because the evidence is probably better than it's ever been that this is a very
real phenomenon and well it's actually a group of phenomena a very real set of
phenomena that that from any other scientific perspective would be
immediately accepted by the scientific community but because of what it is it
gets rejected a priori right out of the box because mainstream science doesn't
know what to do with it and feels threatened by it frankly I think is what
is happening right we're not in a sigh friendly era that's right I suppose
although at the same time there's probably more interest in remote viewing
today than there was 30 years ago well 30 years ago hardly anybody ever knew it
even knew it existed yeah and now it's almost still true if you look at
percentages but still there are thousands of thousands of people who now know about it as well
well you've been a real pioneer in taking this work from the bowels of a
top-secret military program to the general public
Paul it's been a pleasure sharing these two interviews with you and I look
forward to having you come back to our studio and we'll have more conversations thank you I'm excited about being able
to do that thank you so much for being with me you were welcome and thank you for being with us