In
1968, my best friend’s father and youngest brother were in
an automobile accident that claimed both their lives. Just days
before the tragic event, the deceased man’s wife, Mary, had
witnessed the scene during a dream that included the names of the
streets at the intersection at which it would occur!
I can only guess that her vision was innocently ignored as “merely
a dream.” What if my friend’s father had heeded the warning
of his wife to avoid driving that specific route home from the location
of the family business? Might this particular tragedy have been
avoided?
Or was it this man and his son’s “fate” to die that
way? Those that knew the family have voiced both opinions. Some
firmly believe that the vision was a premonition to be used as a
warning so that the accident might be averted.
Others have argued just as strongly that the event was predestined,
and the dream’s purpose was solely to help Mary and other family
survivors to prepare for the inevitable. In retrospect, the dream
seems to exemplify an incidence of precognitive clairvoyance, or
seeing something that actually “happened” in the future.
The
ability to see people, places, and things at a distance and events
happening in the past or future has been known and recorded anecdotally
throughout recorded history. In the modern age, clairvoyance has
been viewed guardedly in the west – often with suspicion -
as a part of the overarching class of psychic abilities and events
known as extrasensory perception (ESP).
Today, scientists use the less-emotionally charged term remote
viewing to describe clairvoyance. During remote viewing,
a person uses the mind to “see” events or locations –
past, present, or future – that are blocked from what we consider
to be the “normal” five senses.
The expression was first coined in 1973 during paranormal science
investigations (psi) conducted by physicists Hal Puthoff and Russell
Targ at the then Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Because of the
impeccable, scientific nature of the experiments that were conducted
over a twenty year period by the team at SRI and other researchers
at different locations, remote viewing has become established
as a viable human skill.
It is interesting to note that most remote viewing research
teams were operating with federal funds, in partnership with government
and military undercover operations during the “Cold War”
years. To those in the military and CIA who believed in remote
viewing (there were skeptics among the ranks who did not) it
was not only a possible skill, but a valuable tool to spy on the
“enemy.”
Since
the veil of secrecy was lifted from federally-funded psi research
in 1995, many of those involved in the early research have speculated
on ways that remote viewing might be used to move past a
“spy” mentality to explore the full range of our human
potential.
A
psychic teaches the blind to “see”
Another
kind of psi venture, akin to the military’s in the understanding
that human sight can be developed by the mind to go beyond physical
limitations, was already underway in 1971. It was the kind of self-actualization
project that is being talked about today in remote viewing
circles. It became a pilot program in 1973, and was spearheaded
by a gifted Intuitive by the name of Carol Ann Liaros. It had nothing
to do with either government or the spy industry.
The main focus of the undertaking was to teach forms of clairvoyance
– including what Ms Liaros calls mind travel in place
of remote viewing - and other psychic skills to teams of
volunteers, who then trained groups of blind individuals to perform
the same applications. This seminal work in the practical application
of psychic skills to enhance the lives of blind individuals became
known as Project Blind Awareness.
During
a recent discussion I had with Ms Liaros in Lily Dale, N.Y., she
agreed, ruefully, that in 1973, teaching the blind to see with their
brains instead of their eyes was a concept ahead of it’s time
in terms of far-reaching, cultural understanding and acceptance.
But lately, public interest in remote viewing has been piqued.
This is due in large part to the information contained in lectures
and books by remote viewing icons such as Targ and Puthoff,
Joseph McMoneagle, “Skip” Atwater, Ingo Swann, Dean Radin,
Stephan Schwartz, Paul H. Smith, David Morehouse, Ed Dames, and
Robert Monroe. Books such as Don’t Kiss Them Good-Bye,
by medium Allison Dubois, describing the author’s crime
scene, remote viewing experiences have been made popular
by the highly rated television series Medium.
Sections devoted to remote viewing, complete with instructions
for “seeing” at a distance have been included in Dr. Judith
Orloff’s latest book, Intuitive Healing. In the 1990’s
there were a handful of Internet sites containing information about
remote viewing. Today there are over 17,400,000 “hits”
in response to a remote viewing Google search. It would appear
that the idea of the blind using mind travel to move about more
confidently in the world is one whose time has finally arrived.
Science
supports the concept of mind traveling
During
the early psi experiments, researchers at SRI sought to study ESP
under a strict scientific protocol. Once the remote viewing
studies began in earnest in those first months of research, Targ
and Puthoff quickly established what is known in scientific circles
as the double blind experimental method to allay entrenched,
cultural fears of fraud as it relates to psychic research.
Under the double-blind remote viewing method, neither the
subject nor the person conducting the experiment was privy to the
whereabouts of the target location until after the viewing session
was over and materials from the lab and target site had been exchanged.
The first remote viewing subject at SRI (and later co-researcher)
was an artist and psychic by the name of Ingo Swann.
The project was dubbed SCANATE, because Swann began by scanning
– with his mind - distant locations, knowing nothing more than
the geographical coordinates. The successes were phenomenal and
submitted in a professional paper to a respected scientific journal
of the times.
Does everyone have inherent remote viewing skills?
As
experimentation continued, Targ and Puthoff began to recruit remote
viewing subjects, some from the very Doubting Thomases
that sought to debunk SRI’s mounting positive results. Much
to their own surprise, many of the erstwhile skeptics themselves
proved to be talented remote viewers.
Talent notwithstanding, none of the subjects failed at demonstrating
basic remote viewing skills under the tutelage and training
of the SRI research team. The overall successes led the SRI team
to conclude that remote viewing is an innate and dispersed
perceptual skill.
Furthermore, since these experiments were of the highest double-blind
quality and no selective reporting occurred when publishing original
and unedited data, conclusions about the inherent quality of remote
viewing were considered valid and replicable.
A
phenomenon that that one of the early researchers, F. Holmes “Skip”
Atwater - author and Director of The Monroe Institute (TMI), founded
by Robert Monroe - eventually became aware of is that everyone is
capable of exhibiting remote viewing skill to some extent.
He also believed that certain people are gifted - much like a great
concert pianist is gifted beyond a normal person’s ability
to play the piano.
Practice doesn't necessarily make one a great remote viewer without
this inherent giftedness in Atwater’s opinion. But he agreed
with other researchers that the potential does exist in everyone.
But self-discipline must be used in practicing remote viewing
to see if the viewer is gifted in the first place.
Carol
Ann’s discovery and use of her psychic talents
Through
a series of synchronous events, that followed a “dark night
of the soul” period in Carol Ann’s life, she suddenly
discovered her own latent psychic abilities at the age of 29. Although
she had not focused her attention on these extraordinary talents
for most of her life, a lecture given by Hugh Lynn Cayce, son of
Edgar Cayce, at Rosary Hill College, located in Buffalo, N.Y., changed
all that.
A desire to understand her own abilities in relation to those of
Cayce - immortalized by author Jess Stearn as the “sleeping
prophet” - guided her to ask many questions of his son that
evening over 30 years ago. This exchange prompted Hugh Lynn to invite
Carol Ann to have tea with him after the lecture.
That meeting led to her eventual participation as a research subject
in an experiment on the effects that psychic healers have on enzyme
activity, being conducted at Rosary Hill. Sr. M. Justa Smith, O.S.
F., then Chairman of Rosary Hill’s Chemistry Department, was
to develop the experiments.
What began as a two-week, research venture, ended up with Carol
Ann staying for eight years as both a subject and a later trainer
at the college’s Human Dimensions Institute - founded by Rosary
Hill Board Alumni, Jeanne Pontious Rindge. During the enzyme project,
Carol Ann gave intuitive medical readings in one room while an energy
healer did the healing experiments in another.
True
to what Skip Atwater had found in his own experimentation with gifted
remote viewers, Carol Ann’s abilities were not exceptional
in the beginning. Over time, she became quite adept at psychically
discerning diagnoses at a distance. These were verified by doctors
on the medical team taking part in the research.
Her abilities began to draw the attention of other psychic researchers
and parapsychological authorities visiting the institute. One of
the visitors and author of Breakthrough to Creativity, Dr.
Shafica Karagula, taught the young psychic to be extremely observant
when measuring her own intuitive impressions, thoughts, feelings,
and sensations during events of paranormal functioning.
Because of this, Carol Ann learned to join the right-brain activity
of intuition with the left brain process of analytical observation
- a skill that has served her well throughout the years, particularly
when training others to access and observe their own psychic skills.
PSI:
Carol Ann style
We
now know that the left hemisphere is the center of language and
analysis and that the right hemisphere is the center of intuition
and recognition of patterns in the world at large. The left relates
to logic and linear reasoning. The right relates to whole systems
such as direct insight, or the intuiting of solutions that bypasses
step by step reasoning. The left proceeds sequentially over time.
The right covers vast ground in space. The left stores memory in
form of language. The right stores memory as images.
In
her book, Intuition Technologies, Ms Liaros writes that “neither
hemisphere of the brain is smarter or more advanced than the other.”1
Because most people tend to show an affinity for one side of the
brain or the other, she gives examples in the book of ways to connect
the two hemispheres.
These include “relaxation and meditation, concentration, creative
imagery, intuition, and laughter.”2 The balancing
of the brain helps an individual to function more fully in every
area of life from the personal to the professional. In Ms Liaros’
opinion, connecting the two sides of the brain can also lead to
being more tuned in to extrasensory information that can be practically
applied in dealing with life’s everyday challenges.
Further more, individuals who develop their psychic skills in a
positive direction experience a more balanced reality, because they
are enhancing their lives with information drawn from both the physical
and intuitive senses.
The
sometimes grueling paces Dr. Karagula put her through in the form
of endless questioning sessions during the observation psychic processing
paid off in Carol Ann’s deeper understanding of the nature
of intuition. Thanks to this method of scientific discernment, Carol
Ann developed the ability to communicate how psychic processes worked
within her own mind and body and to later teach them to others.
She began to understand how to open up and shut down her ESP to
avoid feeling drained during her healing work and to protect her
personal boundaries when working with negative energy patterns that
belonged to others – both valuable intuitive skills.
Some of the talents she explored were feeling the energy fields,
known as the aura, around a body or object; perceiving the
colors that are associated with the different energies in the aura;
telepathy - mind reading; psychometry - object reading; energy healing;
and clairvoyance, or mind travel - all inherent abilities that Liaros
and trained volunteers taught receptive blind individuals to access
during Project Blind Awareness.
Project
Blind Awareness: a practical application
In
1971, Ms Liaros and Professor E. Douglas Dean, parapsychologist
and computer specialist from Newark (NJ) College of Engineering,
were teaching a class on ESP at the Batavia, New York YWCA. After
a session in which the human aura was discussed, a gentleman
and his wife approached Carol Ann.
The man exclaimed that although he had been totally blind for over
41 years since the age of four, he could see the auras of
those around him during the lecture. This led Carol Ann to consider
the prospect of teaching the blind to “see” through the
use of their psychic abilities.
In
1973, after much planning and special techniques for working with
the blind were developed, Project Blind Awareness was born.
Dr. Sean Zieler, a clinical psychologist, and Samuel Lentine, a
blind physicist, assisted. Dr. Zieler created a questionnaire for
recruitment. Part of the questionnaire focused on the reason and
length of blindness, dream recall, and psychic experiences.
Since prejudice against psychic phenomena was still quite prevalent
in the 1970’s, references to them were replaced with more accepted
concepts for the pilot (e.g. the word aura was replaced with
energy). The classes were taught once a week in a small church
in Amherst, N.Y. Each student worked with a trained volunteer.
All participants were taught advanced relaxation and concentration
techniques by Carol Ann and the volunteers to help them become sensitive
to the energy fields all around them. All sessions were recorded
and painstakingly documented to stay as close to a scientific atmosphere
as possible.
A
baseline, consisting of Standard Deviation Units, was obtained by
running series of tests 100 times each with the 20 blind individuals
prior to training. At the end of the eight weeks, after extensive
training, the trials were repeated. Significant improvement across
all fields was measured. Professor Dean ran the statistical analysis
of the tests.
It showed that blind students were able to distinguish correctly
between black and white sheets of paper by merely running their
hands above it (not touching it) 65 percent of the time in over
2,000 attempts, and between red and green sheets 70 percent of the
time in the same amount of tries.
The probability of those percentages happening by chance is greater
than 10,000 to one.3 According to Dr. Zieler, “There
was no way they could have been faking. At the start, it seemed
like pure chance – only 50-50 results. But, the more they did
it, the better they performed – 65 to 70 per cent accuracy,
with some getting perfect scores.”4
Mind
traveling for greater freedom and mobility
Of
all the skills that individuals taking part in Project Blind
Awareness developed, the most useful and popular, was mind traveling.
Ms Liaros describes getting started with the technique by simply
“taking an imaginary trip to a place you have never seen or
visited before, and then making up a story about what you found
there.”5 Although her description is at odds with both Targ
and Atwater’s assessment that imagination hinders the actual
remote viewing process, many of the blind participants developed
verifiable mind traveling skills.
One
young participant’s skills attracted the attention of the then
popular television show That’s Incredible, and her accurate
mind traveling journey was filmed as she, firmly planted in New
York, explored a target site in California while cameras filmed
and documented the event from both locations. From the perspective
of the blind participants, their mind traveling skills were developed
for more than fun and games.
Mind traveling gives a blind person greater freedom and mobility
and less anxiety in the daily challenge of moving about the world
– near or far. One blind man reported that he could walk down
the street without a cane, because he could see windows, lamp posts
and other markers “out of the side of my forehead.”6
One friend of Carol Ann, a woman by the name of Lola, who had been
blind for over 25 years, “explored” from her home in Buffalo,
N.Y. the hotel and the room she would be staying in that was located
in Washington, D.C.
She did this rather than canceling her travel plans for an upcoming
business trip when circumstances prevented her husband, who was
not blind, from accompanying her as he normally did when she traveled.
After a distant viewing of the hotel and the room that included
color scheme and position of doorways, closets and furniture, she
felt secure enough to make the trip alone. But upon arriving at
the hotel, Lola realized that she was being shown the wrong room.
She knew right away that the colors and layout of the room were
different from what she had viewed during her mind traveling experience
several weeks ago. She relayed the mix-up to bell person showing
her the room. Upon checking, he found, to his surprise, she had,
indeed, been given a room on the wrong floor.
He must have certainly wondered how a blind woman could see colors
and the furniture layout of her room! Once the mistake was corrected
and Lola was taken to the right room, she regained her confidence
at being in the place that she had become familiar with while mind
traveling back in Buffalo.
Developing
mind traveling/remote viewing skills
If
you are interested in developing the ability to mind travel, or
remote view, as the case may be, Ms Liaros suggests you begin by
exploring at a distance a few rooms in your own home. This can be
done by sitting comfortably in a chair and relaxing as thoroughly
as you can.
Close your eyes and explore each of the rooms separately. Take careful
note of all details to observe as though through your normal, five
senses. For instance, look at the room’s shape and size? What
are the colors in the room? How does the room smell?
Describe the light coming through the windows as it plays on objects
in the room. Feel the texture and size of the objects. Feel the
floor against your feet. What are the sounds in the room? So far,
you have used two important tools to intuitively remotely view your
own home: your memory and imagination.
Later,
as you feel confident, you can work with a partner to mind travel
to a location that you have never actually seen before. A local
restaurant, park, or public building that you have not been to in
the past is ideal for this exercise. Using a location that is within
your own community will allow you to get immediate feedback as to
the accuracy of your mind traveling session.
Better yet, have your partner go to the building or place you will
be viewing and stay there for the specified length of the remote
viewing session. The first thing that Ms Liaros suggests to
do once you have achieved a state of relaxation is to imagine a
duplicate of yourself, standing at your side. When this has been
accomplished, project the image as your traveling “mind”
out to explore the location in question.
Go through the viewing steps as if you are actually going out to
eat or visiting the location through your partner’s eyes. Use
your five senses as you did with the home viewing exercise. During
mind travel, write down and/or draw your impressions to the best
of your ability.
At the end of the session, compare notes with your partner to check
the validity of your impressions and visit the target location.
Be sure to relax and have fun with the process, and you will be
amazed at what you actually “see” during your mind traveling!
What
will you do with it?
According
to Ms Liaros, psychic ability is neither inherently good, nor bad.
Like electricity, it just is.7 She believes that
it can be used for purposes of manipulation, self-aggrandizement,
parlor games, or for human empowerment and spirituality.
During her research and training over the years, Carol Ann has found
that developing one’s intuition increases creativity, strengthens
decision-making, deepens concentration, promotes goal-setting, and
helps people feel closer to one another.8 Her own skills
became evident rather suddenly during a serious crisis in her life.
Wanting to spare others that hard road, she became a teacher.
She is of the opinion, like those involved in remote viewing
research, that extrasensory perception is, indeed, an innate human
skill, but that practice is essential to its full development. Carol
Ann has always been interested in the practical application of her
own and other’s psychic abilities for the purpose of developing
the full range of human potential.
The primary questions she would ask of a person wanting to learn
any psychic skill would be, “What does it have to do with tomorrow
and your life? How will you take this skill, that we all have, and
apply it in a useful way in your life to make it better, to make
it easier?”9
Notes
1
C.A. Liaros, Intuition Technologies: A STEP BY STEP Guide for
Developing Your Intuitive Potential (Buffalo, N.Y.: Liaros,
Polvino & Associates) 6.
2
Ibid.
3
B.E. Stearn, “Sixth Sense Awareness for the Sightless,”
in The Courier-Express Magazine (March, 1977).
4
Ibid.
5
C.A. Liaros, Intuition Technologies, 81.
6
A.P. Tutko, “Teaching the Blind to See,” in Fate
Magazine (May, 1975) from website at Creative Community Institute,
Inc. (Project Blind Awareness link).
7
H. Reed, “Interview with Carol Ann,” Atlantic University,
Virginia Beach, VA, 2005.
8
C.A. Liaros, Intuitive Technologies, 5.
9
H. Reed, “Interview with Carol Ann.”
Jenna
Ludwig Bio
“Remote
Viewing/Project Blind Awareness”
The
author is a free-lance writer, currently enrolled in Atlantic University’s
Master’s of Transpersonal Studies Program with a focus in Spiritual
Mentoring. Alternative health, dream studies, psychic phenomena
and the work of Edgar Cayce have been of special interest to the
author throughout her life. She may be reached at jcowles2001@yahoo.com.
Contact
Information:
Jenna
Ludwig
4043
8th Avenue North
St.
Petersburg, FL 33713
727-322-2264
home
727-422-5301
mobile
jcowles2001@yahoo.com
Carol
Ann Liaros is Senior Trainer for the Edgar
Cayce Institute for Intuitive Studies. You may see some
of her offerings at www.edgarcayce-intuitionschool.org/carol.htm
Email:
carolannliaros@edgarcayce-intuitionschool.org
