Remote Viewing Through Time and Space

by Judith Pennington -

Some 300 scientists and spiritual seekers closed their eyes, relaxed and listened as remote viewing pioneer Stephan A. Schwartz drew our attention to a "target" site within 20 minutes of us, at the A.R.E. in Virginia Beach.

The target was one of four possibilities selected by a random number generator, so its location was known only to the two people who by then had reached the site.

Schwartz asked us to sketch what came to mind. I drew a tall, narrow vertical object rising out of a round base, and to the right of it, little peaks of water.

Next he asked us to imagine ourselves as being "life size" at the site: Standing there, what were our impressions?

I sensed blues skies, surf, the smell of asphalt and grass, and heard birds singing and the sounds of people on a boardwalk.

This gave way to visions of places I’d been in Virginia Beach: some kind of historic museum related to boats and water, and then the glass doors and asphalt parking lot of the Contemporary Arts Center, two places that I knew were somehow related to the target site.

When the two monitors returned with digital photos depicting the historic lighthouse on Cape Henry beach, a collective gasp of surprise rolled like a wave through the auditorium.

I wasn’t the only one who had tuned in to the target: all but eight, maybe 10, percent of the audience had drawn and described the lighthouse or aspects of it in striking detail.

That’s the way it goes in remote viewing: the science of the psychic.

Over the course of 30 years, remote viewing experiments subsidized by the U.S. government and Schwartz’s own Mobius Society have proved indisputably that "psychic functioning has been well established...far beyond what is expected by chance," according to Dr. Jessica Utts, a leading statistician reporting to the U.S. Congress.

More importantly, remote viewing research has discovered that the ability to perceive (anomalous perception) and influence objective reality (anomalous perturbation) crosses the so-called boundaries of time and space, and it is an almost universal human sensibility.

It appears that the only people unable to do it are those who don’t believe in it or want to.

Especially adept are those who, as British biologist Rupert Sheldrake observes, repeatedly drink from the well of insights in the "morphic field" which Schwartz cleverly refers to as "the matrix."

Even first-timers will succeed with a target like the lighthouse, which by remote viewing standards was perfect: a distinct geometric form embedded in an intensely energetic environment that is changing (atomically degrading, yet gaining coherence at the same time) and in motion, e.g., is emotionally "numinous" with a high psychic charge.

That’s a close description of Virginia Beach, made numinous by the energies of wind and tide and also by the magnetic psychic presence of Edgar Cayce’s Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E).

The same shoe fits many archeological sites from antiquity, Schwartz’s own forte in remote-viewing, as well as psychic power points and sacred sites spinning a web across the planet, from Arizona’s Sedona and England’s Glastonbury to Scotland’s Findhorn Community and the sacred Celtic isle of Iona.

In the conference experiment, one of the four possible targets was a busy highway construction site.

It would not have been as psychically "numinous" as the lighthouse, in terms of earth activity and emotional charge. But virtually any good remote viewing experiment would have succeeded with this audience.

That’s because a great many of us were seasoned meditators with high levels of mental coherence and psychic awareness. We already knew that "there is only one of us," as Schwartz would say, and that we are connected with everything else in the matrix.

The compelling story of remote viewing held us spellbound for the week of Oct. 30-Nov. 2, 2003. You could feel the electrical excitement in the room as scientists, healers and teachers raptly listened to the scientific, military and psychic pioneers of the discipline–all of them creative, lucid and often humorous speakers.

"Remote Viewing through Time and Space" was Schwartz’s second annual conference on Issues in Consciousness (see our interview below). Just like the first one, this conference focused on the awesome capabilities of the human psyche.

The audience laughed long and hard at Dr. Hal Putoff’s story of Ingo Swann and the $100 million shielded magnetometer in Varian Hall of Physics at Stanford University.

Putoff, a physicist working at the Stanford Research Institute since 1972, had proposed a modest program to explore "the quantum aspects of human processing."

Swann, a leading artist and seasoned psychic, had serendipitously seen the proposal, offered his services, and in the first experiment was asked by Putoff to mentally perturb the quantum particles in this supposedly imperturbable superconductor.

Swann said he’d have to psychically "look" inside the magnetometer to do that, and when he did, the printout needles jumped.

A graduate student carrying a clipboard blanched at the sudden peak in the readout and asked them to leave, worried that this $100 million piece of equipment must have malfunctioned.

Every time Putoff and Swann returned to "look" inside the magnetometer, the same thing happened. The particles responded to Swann’s psychic probing.

Two weeks later, the CIA showed up on Putoff's doorstep and explained that the Soviets were spending millions of dollars on this kind of research. Thus began a series of top secret projects funded by a string of government agencies that would also include the U.S. Air Force, Army and Defense Intelligence Agency.

The CIA gave us $50,000 to explore what they considered a lark and we ended up with 13 years of research," Putoff laughed. Having been an intelligence officer for the Navy, Putoff had lots of clearances and Swann had lots of talent.

Indeed, there seemed to be no limit to what Swann and other remote viewers could see.

In the earliest experiments, Putoff placed items in boxes or envelopes for Swann to "see," but this was so easy to do that Swann wanted to work on distant objects and thus coined the term "remote viewing."

These experiments were so successful that the CIA did not believe the results and sent in a scambuster to find the scam.

Naturally enough, the scambuster suspected conspiracy everywhere, until, finally, Putoff invited him to be a remote viewer.

Sure enough, the man drew and described the target, a bridge over a stream, but claimed that he must have been given subliminal cues in people’s body language and maybe speakers in his seat cushion.

Putoff, now determined, put the man in a room by himself, taped the door shut and went to the site with a camera and data recorder. He returned with the photos and data and showed them to the scambuster, who had drawn the very same merry-go-round.

Finally convinced, the scambuster reported his own successful remote viewing to the CIA, which declared that he, too, must be part of the scam.

The CIA’s suspicions deepened when remote viewer Pat Price looked at a cabin in West Virginia, saw the woods and just over the ridge spotted a modern facility.

Price "wandered" through the site, reading name tags, and wrote down a list of words. As it turned out, he’d recorded the code name of the site and the titles of top secret projects in this secluded government facility.

The CIA thought the information had been leaked to the RV project, said Putoff, "so we had a five-year investigation on our necks."

Disbelief was a common reaction in people, despite scientific evidence to the contrary. Putoff quoted one man in saying, "This is the kind of thing I couldn’t believe even if it were true!"

In coming years, remote viewers working with military branches used "anomalous perception" to locate a space flight propulsion-testing facility in the Soviet Union; twelve U.S. missile silos (which got the program scrapped under Pres. Jimmy Carter); a sick U.S. hostage on a plane en route from Iran; and an electronics-laden Russian plane that crashed in Zaire and was retrieved by the CIA before the Russians could get to it.

Belief deepened in people who needed to know and couldn’t otherwise.

Remote viewer Pat Price went to work for the CIA, and Joe McMoneagle won a government commendation for producing crucial and vital intelligence that was unavailable from any other source.

SRI, ultimately separated from Stanford University, made its rounds in the U.S. government and won several meritorious service awards.

Still, at times the RV program could not believe itself. One day, bored with looking around the Earth, Swann took a gander at Jupiter and saw some rings around it.

Carl Sagan was visiting and said, no, there weren’t any rings around Jupiter. Putoff filed the report, anyway, figuring–like Swann–that he had "displaced" to another planet.

The two men were more than a little startled, years later, when a probe reached Jupiter. There were 10 rings around it.

One after another, the presenters told stories that amazed and amused us. Major Paul Smith, then with the U.S. Army, listed code names scrambled from disconnected words to keep the remote viewing projects secret: Gondola Wish, Grill Flame, Center Lane, Dragoon Absorb.

He told how Lt. Skip Atwater, a counter-intelligence officer for the Army and now research director of The Monroe Institute, had worked with projects ranging from remote viewing "bugs" that were later removed from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, to spotting a terrorist, Carlos the Jackal, who, unfortunately, kept moving around and could not be nabbed.

The remote viewing program was declassified in 1985 and in 1995, after the Defense Intelligence Agency cancelled its funding, an interviewee on Ted Koppel’s "Nightline" erroneously claimed that remote viewing had never produced helpful intelligence.

By then, 2,100 operational remote viewing sessions had been done and the data spoke for itself.

Since 1995, remote viewing has caught the public eye and entered the vernacular. Everyone knows what it is, yet few recognize that this is the same natural ability used by Edgar Cayce and other great intuitive readers. But there is a subtle difference.

Remote viewers give just the facts, ma’am, without interpretation or judgment. It is this scientific approach which has brought remote viewing into the mainstream and an era of phenomenal growth.

In 2001, a conferee told Schwartz, there were 30,000 Internet sites related to remote viewing. The number shot up to 130,000 sites by the year 2003.

Today, anyone can participate in precognition and remote viewing experiments. 

Just go to boundaryinstitute.org or ions.org. Enjoy yourself and contribute to the data.

Thirty years of remote viewing research, from 1972 to date, has produced extraordinary insights into how–and even when–our psychic abilities work best.

One presenter, James Spottiswoode, showed that RV experiments work better when the geomagnetic field is low: that is, when there is less activity on our sun.

The quieter the Earth’s magnetic field, the better people do–a fact well known to meditators in every culture, who seek the silence at dawn, noon, dusk and in the deepest hours of night, when the static of human thought also fades into dreams.

Schwartz, an anthropologist, writer, parapsychologist and futurist, has added significantly to this research.

His Mobius Society, active in Los Angeles from 1977 to 1992, uncovered priceless treasures like the lost Lighthouse of Pharos, one of the seven wonders of the world and used gifted intuitives to apprehend murderers, as psychiatrist and author Judith Orloff did by sensing the presence of a neuroleptic drug in the blood of a mail bomber.

Schwartz’s greatest gift, however, is his ability to simplify and communicate complex information.

He has authored or produced national magazine articles, scholarly papers, television documentaries, and four books, mostly on the subjects of therapeutic healing, psychic detectives, remote viewing, crop circles and interspecies communication, in addition to the history and future of humankind.

It is to the latter that this futurist dedicates his time today, in gathering and distributing the daily Schwartz report (schwartzreport.net), a presentation of trend-setting world news; in networking with leading healers, teachers, philosophers, psychics and scientists; and in conducting remote viewing experiments targeted to the year 2050.

In 2050, he tells us, remote viewers "see a very different world from the one we live in today but it’s not an unhappy world."

In his Schwartz report conference series at the A.R.E., Stephan presents the key facts and figures in consciousness research.

One evening at the present conference, he stated in an extemporaneous lecture that, "Something (within us) is quickening, awakening us, that we are finding ourselves drawn to, that is reaching out to all people."

Schwartz, above all a newsman, is himself a purveyor of this quickening; he stirs our abilities to expand and evolve our own consciousness and that of our world.

Interview Between Judith and Stephen A. Schwartz

Judith: In listening to you and other speakers at the conference, I remembered a stream of events that I had never before framed as remote viewing, but now see that they were exactly this. In one case, which I wrote about in my book, a psychic in California was given a Louisiana road map, a photograph of a woman’s missing brother and an article of his clothing...

Stephen: (interrupting) Are you talking about Rosemarie Kerr?

J: You know about this?

S: I made a documentary about it. I got the district attorney and chief of police on camera testifying to the efficacy of her comments. We got the police officer who made the apprehension to reenact it. I did a special for ABC called "Psychic Detective." That was one of the cases we used. If you pull down ESPD Blue on my website (stephanaschwartz.com, under Magazine Articles), you’ll see the story. I also wrote it up in a magazine.

J: Well, I’m astonished. I heard about this case during an interview with a New Orleans psychic, so I drove to New Orleans to read the legal files and thought no one else knew this extraordinary story. (The California psychic pointed out on a Louisiana map, in real-time, the location of the murdered man's truck, which was being driven his murderers, who had dumped the victim's body in a swamp.) I recounted this extraordinary story in my book because these events convinced me, beyond a doubt, of the validity of psychic powers in at least some people. Where I was skeptical before, skepticism was no longer possible.

This was my turning point, and I wondered what pivotal event or events led you to spend five years studying the Cayce readings and later on, to remote viewing research through The Mobius Society?

S: I had a series of experiences when I was a young boy of 10 or 11 and my father was an anesthesiologist. On Saturdays, if I wanted to, I could go in and scrub and sit behind him in the operating room. I did that a number of times, and on one occasion, he scrubbed and a woman who had been in an automobile accident was draped on the operating table. I couldn’t even see whether it was a man or a woman. They began whatever procedure they were doing, and it really was like something out of the movies. Back in those days, they gave gas and the little black bag was expanding and contracting with each breath.

All of a sudden, something happened and they went into this controlled chaos, where they tore off the green surgical towels and I could see that it was a young woman. They began resuscitation, and there was a period where the little gas mask didn’t move. Then after awhile, suddenly they began to get her to breathe again. They never did do the procedure they were going to do. They wheeled her out, and my father went with her, and then he came back a little while later with a rather odd look on his face.

We went off to lunch, and in those days, the doctors had a table in the delicatessen they went to. They were all sitting around, and my father began to describe what had happened. He said this young woman had stopped breathing, they resuscitated her, and when she came to, she described what we today would call a near-death experience. She went down this tunnel, was met by beings of light, they told her to come back. She was floating above her body and couldn’t get anybody to pay attention to her, so she went out into the hallway and saw a young doctor flirting with a nurse. She described all this to my father, down to the color of the guy’s tie, so my father went out and inquired and this, in fact, is what had happened.

Everything this young woman reported in this near-death experience proved out. So my father is telling this at lunch, and one by one the other doctors went around and described similar events that had occurred in their practices.

On the way home, I asked my father what had happened in there, that it had looked like she died. My father said she did die, and I said well, then, how did she know all this stuff? He said we just don’t know, but every once in awhile something like this happens. It’s just one of those mysteries.

I always remembered that story and it had a big impact on me, because it had a big impact on my father. Years later, I was introduced to the Cayce material, and I pulled off a shelf at random a reading given for a woman in 1936, that said she had been a member of the Essene community in what I recognized to be Khirbet Qumran, and that she’d been a teacher of astrology.

I looked at the date on which the reading was given, and I thought how very bizarre, because in 1936 nobody knew that Khirbet Qumran existed, and no one knew that women had been part of the community. All we knew was that Josephus had said they were a schismatic order of Jewish monks, and of course their interest in astrology was not known. I knew that, beginning in 1947 with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, all those things that Cayce described had proved to be correct.

I immediately thought of that young girl in the operating room and asked the same thing: what aspect of consciousness existed outside the bounds of the physical body that allowed her to have the experience she had, and then allowed Cayce to have the experience that he had? Where had this information been stored, I asked myself, and how did he go get it? How does anybody go get it, and what is the mechanism of transmission? Those are the questions on which I started to focus, and they changed the whole course of my life.

J: Where you an anthropologist at that time, or did you subsequently go into that field?

S: No, I was 23 years old then. I had come out of university, worked for National Geographic, went to New York and worked as a screenwriter for a company there, and then, after getting drafted, I’d gone into and come out of the service. So I had an interest in these things because of the observations I’d made, but had no context in which to place them. I’d been reared in a home that had no religious training in or even exposure to religion. But I had a clear understanding that these kinds of events did occur, and that they occurred with some frequency. I became fascinated with what this was telling us about the nature of human consciousness.

Everything else, the founding of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness, and all of that came later, as a result of this lifelong interest in the aspects of human consciousness which we normally dismiss as the ineffable.

Out of that came, really, the sovereign interest in my life and that is: How do individuals in small groups, by nature of their beingness, change the course of history?

J: And as an anthropologist, you’d be looking at that idea in terms of the history of humankind, wouldn’t you?

S: I was attracted to the idea that these experiences are reported across time, culture and geography. You can find them in pre-industrial cultures in the Amazon, mystic Buddhist communities in Tibet, the intensive care wards of modern American hospitals, and individuals who report essentially the same kind of experience. So this is clearly something that is independent of time, culture and geography, is a part of the universal human condition, and is telling us that some aspect of us exists independent of time and space.

My interest in parapsychology and my work as an experimentalist was really driven by my interest in seeing if it was possible to develop protocols to objectively verify what had previously been a matter of subjective speculation or personal experience. I was drawn to subjective experience but also the intellectual challenge of providing objective verification.

J: Was The Mobius Society the first formal way you did that?

S: I did it with the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles first, then founded The Mobius Group as a corporate research laboratory in extraordinary human functioning. For reasons that had to do with funding, I made it a non-profit research foundation a short while later. For 20 years, we did experimentation in remote viewing, creativity, meditation and therapeutic intent. You can get all the papers that came out of that research on my website.

J: For our readers, I’d like to talk with you about two of your archeological remote viewings, Cleopatra’s Palace and Columbus’s caravelles. Can you tell us a little about how you happened to choose those experiments and why?

S: Sure. You can get the details of those papers off my website. The Cleopatra Palace project came first and was part of a much larger project involving Alexandria, Egypt. These targets were chosen not only because of their historical importance but, also, partly because they were highly numinous. Cleopatra is one of the most famous historical personalities of all time, and the palace where she committed suicide is highly numinous, so from my point of view, parapsychologically, it was a perfect target.

The beauty of the archeological projects is that they are all in quest of something that everybody defines as being unknown, and for which people have been searching for hundreds, sometimes over a thousand years. If you find the target, using remote viewing, you can say that the remote viewing actually made a difference. Because everything else has been tried.

On the archeology project in Alexandria, I think 11 remote viewers worked on the map phase of it, and then I took two of them to Egypt to refine what was developed during the map phase so that the final excavation–or, in the case of Cleopatra, the diving work–could be directed very precisely by remote viewing.

But, we also had the site electronically surveyed, using sidescan sonar, so that we could compare the electronic remote sensing with the remote viewing. The remote sensing was done by Harold Edgerton, a professor from MIT who invented the sidescan sonar. He reported that he couldn’t find anything.

So we got into the boat and went out to the coordinates that had been developed out of the remote viewing research and in 20 minutes we found it.

J: And what was there?

S: The remnants of a palace, pillars lying on their sides, the ruins of a building. What had been a large public pillar, sort of like the pillar that’s in Trafalgar Square in London: a great big, tall granite pillar. The remnants of the palace where she had been. Mark Antony’s palace, where he had lived. The Lighthouse of Pharos (also known as the Lighthouse of Alexandria), one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The ancient sea wall, all discovered to be exactly as the remote viewers had described them.

J: I guess you guys were pretty excited about that.

S: We got very excited and so did everybody else, including the national media. This was in 1979, 1980-81. Sixteen years later, the French re-announced this, but they just discovered the same stuff we had reported at the Conference on Underwater Archaeology in New Mexico, in 1979.

J: And it was pretty much the same situation with Columbus’s ships?

S: No, with Columbus’s caravelles, I was approached by Roger Smith, an archeologist associated with the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A & M, the premier marine archeology school in the world. Roger had been working on this project for several years without success. He heard me give a paper at an archeology conference and approached me saying that he was looking for one of Columbus’s caravelles from his fourth voyage and would we be willing to do remote viewing to see if we could locate it? He was very skeptical, but open-minded enough and, I think, desperate enough to try it.

J: And it worked?

S: Yes, but it didn’t work as definitively as the Cleopatra project, because there wasn’t very much left of the wooden ship. But in the place we described, which Roger thought was absolutely impossible–in fact, it took me several days to get him to go to the spot, because he was convinced there was nothing there–when we swam to the spot we found ship remains there, it was fairly emotional.

J: You’ve touched upon a skepticism that intrigues me. I am reminded of how the CIA’s own scambuster did a successful remote viewing and sure enough, the CIA then doubted him.

S: It’s very hard to take this stuff aboard, you know. People go into reality vertigo. Their world tilts and suddenly you’re faced with your own direct experience of something your intellect says can’t possibly be true. And yet, you’ve just observed it.

People react to it in different ways. Sometimes it opens their minds up and they get very excited. They realize there’s a whole new vista to look at. Other people get seriously freaked out and go into denial.

J: What do you think is at the root of this resistance?

S: Everything in our culture trains us to think of ourselves as, essentially, animated meat. Then something happens and you discover that maybe there’s an aspect of yourself that exists outside of time and space, and that has implications for issues of survival after death, and it has to do with what spiritual pilgrims are talking about, and suddenly your nice, tidy world doesn’t look so tidy.

It looks as if you’ve gone through the looking glass, and some people just don’t know how to integrate it into their construct of how the world operates. For them it’s very difficult. They often feel very threatened.

J: That wasn’t the case with you, though, was it? Was there ever anything that frightened you, or has it all been one big, exciting adventure in consciousness?

S: Nothing ever frightened me. It’s always been an exciting adventure. Sometimes it’s been fairly hair-raising, but not because of the psychic or intuitive or remote viewing component.

It gets pretty hair-raising when you deal with issues of funding or feel responsible for people’s lives because they commit to do projects like this. The logistics of it are also sometimes hair-raising.

Once, when we were in Egypt, in Abu Kir Bay near a naval base, we came up from diving and had all these machine guns pointed at us. They thought we were terrorists coming in to sabotage the military base. Everybody got pretty agitated. The people pointing guns at us were young sailors, kind of frightened. You don’t know who they are, they don’t know who you are. I didn’t speak any Arabic, at least at that level of fluency, and they were getting more and more agitated. Finally, the Egyptian naval officer diving with us surfaced and was able to take command of these guys–spoke the language, for one thing.

So you have those kinds of things that can get scary. But no, I have never been frightened by the world that these human abilities opens up.

J: I wondered, actually, if you, yourself, had become a remote viewer?

S: Oh yes, absolutely.

J: Do you find that, with practice, these gifts develop more and more?

S: I think we have an innate ability which is modulated by the development of personal disciplines and the persistence of doing. Like any human skill, like a musical ability. You have a certain gift for playing music but if you don’t take the time to take your piano lessons and practice, you’re going to get only so good. You have to actually work at it. It’s not a free lunch. It’s not like a good fairy comes down, waves her wand and says, "Now you’re a great remote viewer."

 You have the innate ability. That’s in you. That’s just a part of being alive. But you’ve got to use it to get good at it. You’ve got to develop it as a discipline. It’s very much equivalent to a mental martial art.

J: I’m thinking that the concept of "mental martial art" would be more attractive to many people than words like "psychic gifts of the spirit."

S: Yes, and I really want to make the point that this is not supernatural, weird or woo-woo. It’s a normal human function. What remote viewers are doing is teaching themselves how to allow this information signal–that we’re already processing anyway–to surface in our conscious minds, how to capture these sense impressions to be subsequently analyzed by a team of scientists.

J: These sense impressions are in the matrix and we have access to them?

S: Yes, you have complete access to–as near as we can figure out–almost any information. I don’t know what the limitations are, because we haven’t found them yet.

J: Past, present and future...

S: Past, present and future. People can describe for you what something tasted like or smelled like or sounded like or felt like, or what the texture of the object was 3,000 years ago or 100 years in the future or next week or whatever. There doesn’t seem to be any limitation of time or space.

J: This was made especially clear in your examples of associated remote viewing, a discipline that you invented so that remote viewers might look into the past or future to ascertain numbers. In this protocol, you ask the remote viewer to look into the future for an outcome before the target set (of possibilities) is selected, which seems to indicate that from the time a decision is made to conduct the experiment, a future outcome exists and the remote viewer is able to perceive that outcome.

But how can this be, when psychics tell us, and so does our common sense, that if we change our behavior, we change the outcome? This experiment says that every intention has a fixed outcome.

S: Yes, I think you can say that what we call reality is really the realm of the will, of intention, and that time and space are the longitude and latitude of intention. It’s how we know that something happened here, or it happened there, it happened at this time, or it happened at that time. So that we can see cause and effect occur. You did this, that happened subsequently. So time-space really is, in a sense, the longitude and latitude by which we demarcate where these events that have causal relationships occur.

So I think that, quite reasonably, this is the realm of the will.

J: But it’s more than that, isn’t it? There’s something really big here. Because I feel that what this is saying is that from the moment you make a decision to do a certain thing, the intention is set and so is the future outcome. That’s how that remote viewer is able to fast-forward in time to see the outcome before the judges even get together to choose the targets.

S: Well, you see, a series of potential futures are set in motion, only one of which will become actualized. The remote viewer skips all the intermediate steps and just goes down the timeline to the moment when the answer is known, and that’s what they describe. So in a sense it doesn’t matter what happens in-between, because that’s already been taken into account. As you saw in the seminar, we spent about an hour and a half talking about this. People find it very, very hard to take aboard.

J: Yes, because to me what it’s saying is that the minute you have made the decision to have this experiment, the remote viewer fast-forwards in time and sees the outcome, and by God, the thing the remote viewer sees actually happens. It’s not just about validating the remote viewer’s ability to see into the future. It’s saying that once we decide to do this experiment, the future is set.

S: Well, a future is set.

J: But you have these remote viewers doing these experiments for 2050. What if we change, as a culture? What if something happens and everything changes? Is that accounted for?

S: Yes. That’s the part that’s so hard to understand. It’s not that the future is fixed. It’s that the remote viewer goes down the time line and reads–if they’re accurate, if they don’t displace to an alternative future–they go down the timeline and read what happens, and whatever that is already accommodates all of the choices...

Q: ...that all of the people have made, all of those go into the melting pot? So that’s how you won the California lottery?

A: Yes. And we picked the right number, with teams of remote viewers each picking one number. Each number had to be associated with a target, so we had nine teams and hundreds of remote viewings. Then, after we boiled down all those remote viewings, we would have to go out and buy tens of thousands of tickets.

There have been a number of these associated remote viewings done and all of the ones that were well done have been successful.

The Mobius Society tripled its money, Hal made the $26,000 needed to start a Waldorf School, Russell Targ made nine successful calls on silver futures all in a row, against astronomical odds. But again, the logistics become so formidable, just unsustainable.

Because the first one was a horse race and we picked the winning horse, people got the idea that this was a get-rich-quick scheme. They quickly discovered that you could get rich, but it wasn’t quick. It’s not a magic bullet. It’s not a cure-all. It’s not like, in the science fiction movies, where suddenly, you get the nine-digit number and go in...that’s not how it works.

J: I am reminded of that old saw about the science fiction of today being the fact of tomorrow. Tell me a little bit, will you, about the 2050 experiments. How many people, how many countries, and what, essentially, are they finding? Presumably the world is not going to end, since they are seeing human existence in 2050.

S: I started the experiments in 1978, asking people to go to the year 2050 and describe what they saw. Now, why 2050? Well, Arthur C. Clarke made a very important comment. He said that any technology that is sufficiently advanced appears as magic to those who don’t understand the technology.

I knew that if you looked at future predictions, like Cayce or Nostradamus, it becomes very difficult to understand what they are trying to say. They are seeing something that is so far in the future that they don’t have the words to describe it.

How does a 15th century man describe nuclear physics? 

"Well, there are these little tiny things, they move around, there’s a lot of energy, it’s like there’s a sun in a bottle." If I described that, you’d say it’s all nonsense.

If you read the Nostradamus quatrains, an awful lot of it sounds like nonsense. But the problem is, I think, that he is trying to describe–using a poetic form, to make it even weirder–a very advanced technological process but has no real competence in the technology.

So if I describe nuclear power as, "You know you build this stone structure and it’s round and dome-like and in it they have a miniature sun and they use the sun to generate this thing that goes across wires that will light your house"–well, what the hell does that mean? It’s accurate, but it doesn’t mean anything very useful.

So in picking 2050, I went down the timeline far enough that the events that were going to be described were unlikely to be immediately obvious, based on current affairs, but were not so very different from our own world that they were incomprehensible.

J: What do they say it’s going to be like?

S: There are several things, and I don’t want to say too much about what they are because I want people to continue to do the experiments. About 4,000 people have done it in six countries, and I will say that the results have been astonishingly consistent. There are several things which they described as having happened by 2050, things which had already come to pass.

The most notable of these, beginning in 1978, was their description of a disease of the blood which came out of Africa and crossed over from primates, passes through the blood, spread across the world and devastated a number of countries. I went to a cardiovascular researcher who was quite prominent nationally and asked him if he could explain to me what it was they were describing. He had no idea, but two years later, beginning in 1980, 1981, AIDS began to emerge and we know now that AIDS is a disease which crossed over from primates, came out of Africa, followed various vectors through a number of different cultures and has devastated cultures all over the world.

J: Okay. What else?

S: They described the rise and evolution of what I now recognize as virtual reality. They would say things like, "You know, you put on this outfit and get into this box, it’s like a telephone booth laying on its side, only it has something that conforms to your body, and when you’re wearing this suit, you can project your consciousness out into space, only it’s not really space, it’s like an electronic space. Only it’s really real, but it’s not real."

And I would say things like, what do you mean, it’s really real but it’s not real? "Well, you know, when you’re in this space, it’s as if that’s really where you’re located, but your body is somewhere else..." Those kinds of comments. I didn’t have any idea what they were talking about.

They would say that, "People don’t travel so much anymore. They don’t need to, because they get into this apparatus and can project themselves anywhere they want to. In fact, they’ve created worlds that don’t exist in the real world, but it is in the real world."

Of course, this is exactly what has happened. People create avatars and go into virtual reality. You know, you can be a unicorn and touch and feel things. So that was a typical one.

The third one I want to tell you about is so well established that I don’t mind talking about it. They described for me, from the very beginning, that we didn’t have an overpopulation problem. In fact, we had an under-population problem in a number of countries.

In those days, back in the late 1970s, I had been on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Secretary of Defense discussion group on Innovation of Technology in the Future, and I’d been involved with the Smithsonian in innovative technology in the future. So like most good futurists, my great fear was that there would be this vast overpopulation and that all of our natural resources would get used up. That was my view of the future.

The remote viewers kept saying to me, "No, no, that’s not going to be what happens at all. There’s going to be under-population. Natural resources won’t be the problem. There actually won’t be enough people in some countries." I thought that was just wrong, it was just nonsense.

But of course, now, today, we know from the demographics being projected in countries like Japan that there are 138 million Japanese today, and by 2030, 2040, there may be only 60 million Japanese, and this is a huge problem. There is not a single country in Europe that has a sustainable birth rate. You have to have 2.1 children per fertile family for a country to have a sustainable birth rate, and there’s not a single country in Europe that does that.

In countries like Italy, France, England, they don’t have 2.1, which means that more people are dying than being born. Populations are going to drop.

J: How will that affect the world?

S: Well, it’s going to make a huge difference. What are you going to do in a country like France, for instance, which has a growing Muslim population? There are now about 30 million Muslims in France, and the ethnic Muslims are procreating in excess of 2.1 children per fertile family, while the ethic French are procreating at the rate of maybe only 1.9. This means there’s going to be a huge population shift in France. It’s going to become an increasingly Muslim country, with the ethnic French an increasingly small population, until they ultimately become a minority in their own country.

The same thing is happening in America. California no longer has a white majority. The United States will be, overall, a majority non-white population. And that’s going to change the whole look and nature of the political process in the United States. We assimilate minorities pretty well, but in a country like France, which does not, the ethnic French are going to become very agitated about this and there will be lots of political repercussions from it.

J: So this is demographics, but with enormous implications.

S: Sure. People go to war over this.

J: So how will people live in 2050?

S: I don’t want to say because I’m still doing this experiment, and some of your readers may be participants. I will just say that what you’ve heard about the future is not what is going to happen.

In the late 1980s, the remote viewers who participated in this experiment came back from the experience saying, "My God, that’s not at all what I thought I was going to see." People were invested in apocalyptic events and were quite upset that they weren’t seeing the apocalypse.

They would come up to me and say this is a dangerous experiment, because it’s keeping people from seeing that there’s going to be a horrible apocalyptic event. I said, "Well, you know, if you didn’t see it, maybe it’s not going to happen."

I used to say to people, "What will you do if the apocalypse doesn’t occur?" I remember very clearly a couple who had just converted all of their money to diamonds and kruggerands. They had stocked up for years and were convinced that this apocalypse was upon us. They did this 2050 remote viewing and were really upset.

J: If intentionality, then, is the central driving force of reality, and presumably we will be alive and well in 2050, does this say that there is more positive intentionality today and henceforth than there is apocalyptic intentionality?

S: Well, that’s an interesting question. I will only say that the world apparently does not end up the way that most of us think it will.

J: Which is dead.

S: Yes.

J: All right. Let me just go at this another way. You said in one talk that people, partly because of remote viewing, are awakening to their potential and that we’re getting some help.

S: I don’t remember saying that, or what I might have meant by it. But I do believe that the universe defaults to harmony. You don’t see nature being inharmonious, even through all the processes–death, life and rebirth. So I believe that nature defaults to harmony, and there are lots of good reasons for that, having to do with efficiency and the way systems operate. Things tend to move toward chaos, but then they reassert themselves in harmony.

J: And order and balance.

S: Yes. That’s just the way things work.

J: So that’s our saving grace.

S: Yes.

J: Ingo Swann said that if even 60 percent of us were to awaken to our innate abilities, we’d all be on the same page at the beginning of the book.

S: My experience has been that individuals in small groups who have strong intentions can produce effects that are vastly disproportionate to their numbers. We see this happening over and over again through history. We have the capacity to create the world we want.

We are, in fact, creating it in any case. Not having a clear intention is a form of intention, and if we want the world we hope for, then we are going to create that world not by grand gestures, but by the aggregate of tens of thousands of tiny decisions. 

It is those tiny decisions–what car do we buy, where do we eat and live, how do we behave toward strangers–that make a huge difference as to how the world works.

So while we’re all nattering on about grand philosophical or metaphysical issues, the truth is that the world we live in and are going to live in is being created by the choices we make.

J: So it behooves us to...

S: Make conscious choices that are life-affirming and recognize that all life is interdependent and interconnected.

J: And know that everything is going to come out all right and, hopefully, more of one world than it is today?

S: I think we’re always going to be diverse, but that we are gradually coming to recognize our interdependence and interconnectedness. It doesn’t mean that we have to be of one mind. But it does mean that we have to recognize that we are not the only mind. Or, put another way, as the Buddhists would have it, that there is really only one mind.

J: And in it we are all interconnected.

S: All imbedded in it.

J: What would you suggest that people do to make this a better world?

S: We stand on a threshold, wherein our choices are deciding for us collectively what kinds of world we’re going to live in. The question for the spiritual pilgrim is: What changes do I seek? Where are we headed?

Let’s put a few trail markers down, as it were. We have the lowest voting record of any industrial society in the world. We consume, by some estimates, about as much as a third of the world’s resources, and we squander resources with an abandon that would have made a Caesar blush. And what we don’t waste, we pollute.

I suggest to you that society is a web of life, that we are each feeding into it and being fed by it. We are an interesting society. I’ve been looking at a lot of our major institutions recently and Ihave been struck by a series of patterns which I see emerging. One of them is that we are terribly punitive. There is that within us which seeks to punish those reduced to a lesser quality of life.

We are a society in which all religious discourse essentially has to do with sex. Religion today is a kind of genital theology, one which has replaced spiritual search with pelvic orthodoxy. The issues are premarital sex, adultery, homosexuality, abortion, masturbation, adolescent sex. Where is the discussion about angels?

We are a society which has lost track of the relevance of spiritual purpose. Now where is that going to come from? Where is this reorientation to that part of spiritual quickening going to come from?

J: From within us, I would think.

S: It is indeed going to come from us. We’re the source of change, not the government, not the universities–you and I. Making things change doesn’t require 24 hours a day of effort. But it does require 24 hours a day of intentionality. 

If each of us would commit to making things better for half an hour a day, even if it’s only picking up trash by the side of the road, we would soon have extraordinary stories to share with one another and the world would be a better place. What would happen if we all chose to buy only those kinds of things that represented our vision of the world as we would like it to be? 

When will those of us who profess a commitment to spiritual principles make manifest those principles? When will our beingness add its weight to the emergence of a new life-affirming critical consensus?

We have reached a point where one must think like a hero to behave as one merely human. I think that is our principal challenge for change. We are all heroes, potentially. When will we become heroes actually? The choice is ours as any choice is. And any choice is better than dithering indecision.

The question is not, "Do I have the ability to do remote viewing to change the world?" The question is, "What are you going to do with this ability, this potential? And when will you do it?"

Stephen A. Schwartz was a ghostwriter for the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, Pres. Richard Nixon and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger. He has written 32 published papers on international strategy, geopolitical analysis, maritime affairs, anthropology, archaeology, innovation and technology, and history, and he is the author of four books:The Alexandria Project, The Secret Vaults of Time, Mobius: Explorations in Consciousness and Forgotten Founder: The Biography of George Mason. His four experiential CDs take listeners on guided remote viewing voyages through time and space. Purchase Stephan’s books and CDs through his personal website stephanaschwartz.com and be sure to add his Schwartzreport(.net) to your favorite sites.

oneworldspirit.org