Clairvoyance and remote viewing

The teaching

As the remote viewing method of Ingo Swann and the Stanford Research Institute teaches it.

Clear seeing

Clairvoyance is the claim to perceive something hidden or far away without the eyes and without any other mind as a go-between. The difference from telepathy lies in the target: in a test of telepathy someone looks at the target, while in a test of clairvoyance no one knows it until afterwards. Those who claim the faculty describe it not as seeing with the eyes but as impressions arriving: shapes, textures, colours, a sense of space, sometimes a whole scene.

The mesmerists' lucid sleep

The French word came into English with the mesmerists, who taught that the magnetic sleep brought on by the operator's passes has degrees, and that in its deeper degree some subjects become lucid. The lucid subject was held to be in rapport with the operator, hearing that one voice above all others, and could be sent in mind to a place the operator named, describing it as though walking through it: this they called travelling clairvoyance. The operator guided the journey step by step with questions, much as the interviewer in remote viewing does now.

Remote viewing

Remote viewing is the laboratory form, worked out at the Stanford Research Institute with the artist Ingo Swann and others. In its first protocol an outbound experimenter, sometimes called the beacon, goes to a site chosen at random from a sealed pool of targets. At an agreed time the viewer, sitting in a quiet room with an interviewer who does not know the site either, describes and sketches whatever comes to mind about where the beacon is. Afterwards the descriptions are judged against the pool.

Swann developed a version without a beacon, in which the target is named only by a coordinate, at first a map reference and later an arbitrary number standing for it, so that the viewer is given nothing that could suggest the answer. From this grew the coordinate method, taught in stages, which the viewer works through in order in every session.

The first stage: the ideogram

In the coordinate method the viewer hears or reads the coordinate, writes it down, and at once lets the hand make a quick, unthinking mark on the paper, the ideogram. The viewer then feels the mark as it was made, its motion, flat or rising, smooth or sharp, and from it names only the broadest kind of thing present: land, water, a structure, a living thing, motion. The first stage aims to touch the main shape of the site, which the method calls its major gestalt, before the mind has time to guess.

The senses, then the shape

The second stage gathers impressions of the senses without names: colours, textures, temperatures, sounds, smells, tastes, and a first sense of size, tall or wide, open or enclosed. The third stage turns to dimension, motion and form, and the viewer sketches shapes and layout. Later stages set the impressions out in a table and question them for their qualities and meanings. Each stage builds on the last.

Analytical overlay

The central lesson of the method concerns the mind's habit of naming. A viewer who senses something tall, round and white by the water wants at once to say lighthouse, and the name, once said, takes over: every later impression is bent to fit it. The method calls this analytical overlay, and teaches that names are usually wrong where raw impressions may be close. So the viewer writes the guess down, marks it as overlay, sets it aside, and returns to describing. The interviewer's task is the same: to keep the viewer describing and not naming.

The interviewer and the blind

The protocol depends on ignorance. The person in the room with the viewer must not know the target, since a knowing face, a pause or a leading question can steer a description without anyone meaning it to. The target must be chosen by chance, by someone else, from a pool prepared in advance. The viewer's sketches and words are copied and handed over before any feedback is given, so that nothing can be changed once the answer is known.

Judging

A description is worth exactly as much as it fits the true target better than the others. So the transcripts go to a judge who has not seen the target, together with the whole pool or a set of five or so candidates, and the judge ranks the candidates by how well each fits. A first place for the true target is a hit. Judged this way, a vague description that fits many places earns nothing, and a description that fits the target alone earns everything. The judging, not the viewer's confidence, is the verdict.

A fair trial at home

The same rules make a fair trial at home, which the practice on this page sets out. They are the laboratory's: someone else chooses the target by chance, no one who knows it sits with you, you write your impressions before seeing anything, and the description is laid beside several others before you decide what it matches. Clairvoyance is claimed, and this is how a claim is checked. Nothing here trains a faculty, and the house offers no exercise for one.