Excerpt from “Opening to the Infinite” by Stephan A. Schwartz
How to Remote View
To begin, you need a quiet spot where you will not be bothered. A place which is not too visually busy, nor one that has noticeable odors or recurring sounds. In this place you need a pen or pencil, and either a photocopy of one of the forms included in the Appendix or a blank piece of paper. If you are using blank paper write your name, address, and the time and date of your Remote Viewing; if you are using the form, fill in the questions at the top. Note the time when you start and stop the session; whether there is a monitor/interviewer, and who that person is. Also mark whether the session will be a precognitive or real time viewing. Precognitive means that to get the answers about the target you must describe something presently unknown that will happen in the future: “I will show you a picture to be selected by a computer in one hour.” Real time means that the information about the target is available at the same time you are doing the viewing although both monitor and viewer are blind to the answer: “Please describe for me where the person I name is presently located.”
1) Meditate
Before doing a session many viewers find it useful to meditate, or at least sit quietly for a few minutes to let the normal rhythms and stimuli of the day recede. I will say more about this in the next chapter.
2) Be an Eyewitness
What you are going to do next is very much like being an eyewitness. All your senses will report, and you’ll be amazed at how much information you can get. You will know what something smells like, what sounds are present at the target, and what colors can be found there. Shapes, textures, even tastes can be accurately described. You can be there, at the site, even though your physical body is in your quiet space. You can hold the target object in your hands, even though its selection lies minutes or hours into the future, or is half a world away.
You are conscious. Remote Viewing is not about channeling. No spirits speak through you. Remote Viewing is not a journey into the supernatural. It is, instead, a heightened natural state of consciousness that has two components. One is opening your conscious mind to normal sense impressions that are typically undifferentiated – we tend to process our awareness of our senses collectively, not one sense at a time. What you would taste if you could physically place something in your mouth is the same taste you will have when you Remote View, although the Remote Viewing experience will be more like a memory of the taste. The other component is less familiar, and far less understood. This is the sense of connection to a greater unity, a sense of knowingness that is always present, although generally unacknowledged except as a hunch, gut feeling, or intuition.
3) Be Life-size
When you are settled, and relaxed, the monitor should give you the suggestion that you are your regular size, and are now at the target location, or seeing the target picture, or (putting out your dominant hand, right if right-handed) holding the target object in your hand. If there is no monitor, the viewer makes this suggestion. It helps many viewers to say it out loud: “I am my normal life-size…” The exception to this is when you are viewing something very very small. Early in the last century a series of viewings were done of subatomic particles, with some fascinating success. [i]
4) Make a Simple Drawing
Trust that the next image that comes into your mind is about the target. Make a simple drawing. There are examples of what these look like throughout this book. You are not in an art contest. Nor should you be self-conscious about any drawing skill you do or do not possess. Catching the basic geometric forms is the goal. The drawing’s purpose is to fix the image of the target in your conscious mind. You may be surprised, but your simple drawing will give you something concrete to connect directly with your interior experience. Every time you see the drawing the target comes back clearly in your mind. You may add to the drawing, or make other drawings as the session proceeds.
5) All the Senses Provide Impressions
In addition to full-color visual be sure and note any smells, sounds, textures, or other experiences you associate with the target. If your target is an object and not a place, put your hand on the object, or around it. Feel it. Is it hard or soft? One piece or several pieces? Here, again, all of your normal senses will give you impressions.
The images usually come almost immediately with a visual quality of a daydream, or fantasy. If nothing comes, make something up. Tell yourself, and your monitor, a story you invent as you tell it. Just let sense impressions emerge distinctly in your mind. This is one of the keys to being successful. We rarely, even in our normal waking state, process each sense independently. And when we do we often make a point of acknowledging it – “Smell that flower.” In Remote Viewing you can isolate the senses in this same way.
6) A Sense of Knowing
It is, however, much less a question of seeing, than of “knowing.” Only a small percentage of people visualize explicit imagery very well. Close your eyes. Visualize a violin. Did you literally see a picture of a violin in your mind, or just have a sense of knowingness about it? The experience you have just had gives you a sense of how you do Remote Viewing, and what it will be like for you.
7) Take a Break and Say “Target”
While you are doing the viewing, you may lose your focus, your concentration on the target. If you find yourself drifting, and random thoughts begin to percolate up into your consciousness, it is time to take a short break. Just do something to break the rhythm. Talk or do something else unrelated to the session. After a few moments return to viewing. Say to yourself, or have the monitor say, “Target” again twice, both times with the intent that saying it will refocus you on your target. Then let your mind clear briefly, and record the first impression that comes in. You may have to take several breaks during the course of a session. This is perfectly normal.
8) Debrief
Sometimes a thought or impression will stimulate analysis. “This reminds me of a bicycle I had as a girl”… “I think I know what this is, it’s a pair of scissors.” When you find yourself analyzing what you are perceiving, make a note of that on your paper. Label it “Debrief.” The judge of the session will know to put these impressions in a different category.
9) No Stress and About 20 Minutes
This whole process should have a relaxed, informal quality, and not take more than 20 minutes. If you feel stressed you’re not doing it correctly— playfulness is the right frame of mind.
Let me emphasize again that you not interpret or make logical the sense impressions and knowingness that you experience in a viewing session. All Remote Viewing training, whatever its form, gets down to learning how to allow these impressions and this knowingness to emerge from behind the cloud of judgment and analysis that we are trained to from birth. If you come home with a good report card, in our culture, you get lots of strokes. If you do it consistently there are many institutional forces that will reward you. If you say that your classmate is going to fall into the lake at summer camp and drown, at best you will be ignored. If you make such observations frequently you will be considered weird or suspect. Few individuals or social structures will be there to support you. So, in some circles, it takes a certain amount of guts to Remote View.
“Figuring out” — Analytical Overlay in the jargon of science — usually produces inaccurate impressions because it requires analysis and judgment. Be like a radar sweeping the horizon. A radar does not think. It simply reports an impression. It imposes no cherished outcomes or limits as to what something should look like, smell like, or even whether it can exist. You must learn to do the same if you want to become proficient as a Remote Viewer. I trained myself, and have long suggested to others, that stopping several times a day and naming, one-by-one, my sense impressions at just that moment is a powerful conditioning tool.
Doing this will also have a wonderful effect on your being able, as almost every spiritual tradition has it, to be in the “now.” You will also find that this stops the interior monologue. You are not replaying something from the past, nor projecting something into the future. You are just who you are, where you are, in that moment. Saying you will sometimes have a sense of “oneness” is just words. What that means must be experienced to be understood.
10) On Using Monitors
A Remote Viewing session can be done alone, or with a monitor/interviewer. If you do it with a monitor, the person can ask questions: “Look to your left; what do you see?” “Look down at your feet; what do you see?” “Are any other people present?” “Is the object made in one piece or several pieces?” But, and this is very important, the monitor’s job is only to keep you talking and in contact with the target, not to guide what you say.
The big problem with monitor/interviewers is that they tend to ask questions that subtly, or not so subtly, bias the viewing to produce what they think about the target: “Can you make out any particular sound in the noise you hear?” That question should be: “You are at the target location, can you hear anything?” In a practical application the temptation is to ask: “How was the woman whose picture is in this envelope murdered?” When what should be asked is “Describe the present circumstances and conditions of the person whose picture is in this envelope.”
Monitors should practice their questions in their mind, before they speak, making sure to weed out any queries that cue a particular response. Even trained psychologists often introduce their biases without realizing it. The tapes of interviews across a range of subjects from suppressed memories to abductions reveals this. Non-cuing is an essential skill every monitor must develop. With practice the proper form and rhythm between viewer and monitor emerges.
For both viewer and monitor, Remote Viewing sessions are very intimate. The monitor must impose no judgment on what the viewer is saying, however illogical or strange it may sound. The viewer must be willing to let their guard down so that the raw, unfiltered impressions can come through. Many people prefer to work with monitors, and if you think of the session as a dance, rather than just an interview, the process will go more smoothly.
It is quite possible to conduct a session at a distance, either via telephone, or Internet Instant Messenger, and good results can be obtained this way. My experience though has been that telephone interviews work best after the viewer and the monitor have done some sessions face-to-face.
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[i] Annie W. Besant and C. W. Leadbeater. Occult Chemistry; investigations by clairvoyant magnification into the structure of the atoms of the periodic table and of some compounds. Ed. C. Jinara?Jada?Sa, assisted by Elizabeth W. Preston. Adyar, Madras: Theosophical Pub. House, 1951.