The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

[araucaria]

This (multiple) post is an offshoot of the Courtney Brown February/March announcement thread, and offers a tentative (tentative) critical examination of the principle behind remote viewing. While the main thread is mostly operating on the basis that remote viewing (RV) is for real, that hypothesis may be true or false, or possibly falsely true… – but it needs appraisal. I am assuming a working knowledge of the basic concepts and procedures, which anyone following the other thread surely needs to have, because whatever the forthcoming announcement, there is definitely going to be an RV component that needs to be grasped. This is my own level: I have read quite a bit on RV, but I’m by no means an expert. Hence this approach to a theoretical analysis is open for discussion, development and improvement. It does not necessarily correspond to any personal opinion that I may have formed at this stage (I haven’t), so please make sure that any discussion is not in terms of conflicting viewpoints. Conflicting viewpoints are precisely not what RV is about. I would suggest it is about convergence. The question is: what converges with what?

When trying to understand what is going on with remote viewing, the hardest part is possibly grasping the role of the numbers that are typed into an email message as target coordinates (2 four-digit numbers). The actual figures are not normal grid references that can be looked up on a map to position the target; they are perfectly random, and no more meaningful than the number given to a prisoner in a concentration camp. That is the whole point and is what makes the experiment blind and hence more scientific. It is also what makes the operation seem somehow magical. And this may be where any sleight of hand, whether accidental or deliberate, is being done, because one wonders why bother naming a target at all? It goes counter to the very purpose of naming, which is generally to identify things and people. It also goes counter to the purpose of aiming, which is generally to plot a course to an identified target.

The situation can schematized as follows. There is a target and the input of two clearly separated agents, the remote viewer and the task setter, or tasker. The tasker designates the target; the viewer identifies the target – two separate paths that only meet at the target itself. I am deliberately leaving to one side the subsequent judging process, which has problems of its own, and restricting my analysis to the RV process per se, from issuing a task, whatever it may be, to the viewers’ submission of hard copy, whatever that may be.

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[araucaria]

A possible tool for understanding what is going on here is what is known as the semiotic triangle. Semiotics is the science of signs, and the semiotic triangle, or triangle of reference, shows in diagrammatic form the relationship between a sign and the real life object it designates (known technically as the signifier and the signified, or symbol and referent).


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Here you have the sign (e.g. spoken or written word) which designates the real-life object, but not directly (hence the broken line). The sign is arbitrary: as Shakespeare says, 'That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet'. So, in the example given in the diagram, the word or sound ‘Tiddles’ only relates to one particular feline through a convention: the naming of the cat. The name is arbitrary, for another name (Pussy), a dog’s name (Fido), or a man’s name (Prince Charles) are just some of the possible alternatives. (Similarly, we say ‘cat’ when others say ‘chat’, ‘gato’ or ‘Katz’.) The sign-object relationship is indirect, via the concept. We go from the sign to the concept through perception: we see/hear the sign to reach the concept. The concept relates to the object through the experience we have of it, which can vary from none at all to a great deal. If you know there is a cat named Tiddles, or if you recognize that as a cat name, you will immediately think cat in general; if you know the cat in question you will visualize its individual features. Or if it is called Fido, you may mistakenly think dog, and not know until you see it, experience it, that it is actually a cat. Similarly you cannot conceive who or what 12345678 is or looks like till the first time you see/experience him/it in some shape or form.

Hence the concept becomes richer and more specific through experience of the object, and the sign becomes richer and more specific through its relationship with the concept informing it indirectly about the object, even though the direct relationship of designation remains a simple one of arbitrary labelling.

This whole triangular process has to be seen as indefinitely recurring. Hence signs are built up into a system (a language) in which they interact and gain meaning from each other while losing something of their inherent arbitrariness. Think, for example, of the pig farmer who said, ‘Rightly be they called pigs!’ This is not so much a tautology as a circular argument. Pigs are what they are; the word is applied to people; the human connotation falls back on the pigs. There may be a little circularity going on when remote viewers but only ‘military grade’ practitioners are set an indecipherable task and score full marks.

Smaller segments than words can also lose their arbitrariness. For instance, the letter (sound) ‘j’ beginning a word, although seemingly meaningless, tends far more often than it should to designate some kind of sharp, direct action – as in jab, jangle, jam, jar, jeer, jerk, jiggle, jilt, jive, jolt, jump etc.

A similar process goes on at the conceptual level: thinking involves the confrontation of several concepts and can lead to new, often more complex, concepts. And the same thing happens of course at the real-life level: the cat will do catlike things (fight cats and dogs, have kittens, eat mice, say little), but may learn a few uncatlike tricks (be friendly with cats and dogs, take a contraceptive, eat roast chicken and even vegetables, talk to humans).

Thus we have an abstract mental operation that involves interaction with concrete reality on the one hand, and with signs, on the other, which combine a concrete aspect (letters, sounds…) and an abstract component (meaning). This ‘abstract mental operation’ is itself a combination of the material (mental meaning brain activity) and the immaterial (abstract meaning non-physical).
Transposing: remote viewing is an abstract mental operation that involves interaction with what exactly? on the one hand, and with signs, on the other, which possess a concrete aspect (digits) but no? abstract component (meaning).

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[araucaria]

Now let’s apply the semiotic triangle to the remote viewing experience.

The above definition contains two questions (in bold):


remote viewing is an abstract mental operation that involves interaction with what exactly? on the one hand, and with signs, on the other, which possess a concrete aspect (digits) but no? abstract component (meaning). What exactly does the RVer perceive (the target)? And are the task coordinates totally meaningless? These are not rhetorical questions. The answers we have to date are not proven. We are told that the perception of the target is somehow adequate or true to that target. But how exactly? – do we know that? Are there not perhaps degrees of adequacy (one suspects there must be)? And we are told that the task coordinates are meaningless, if not totally, then as near as dammit. That at any rate is the intention; whether this is actually the case needs checking.



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1. Target coordinates (sign). The relationship between the random coordinates and the target itself, as the sign to the object (signifier to signified), becomes an established convention when more than one remote viewer views the same object using the same coordinates. This is the origin of meaning: a meaningless sign becomes meaningful when stably associated with say a real-life object. Just how stable in this instance is a moot point. The implication is that multiple remote viewers will all agree, i.e. establish and subscribe to the ‘convention’, thereby entering a unit of vocabulary into the language. On the other hand, the use of a random number generator suggests just the opposite: an incidental, meaningless, disposable label. This discrepancy is important, because it might make the general consensus somehow suspect instead of being corroborative.

This leads to an interesting possible experiment, which would involve assigning old coordinates to a fresh target. Theoretically this could happen randomly. The coordinates are a pair of 4-digit numbers. There is a 9999 to 1 chance of you and I sharing the same pin number, so the chances of sharing two such would be in the order of 100 million to 1. Hence in real life, there must be a few people sharing two pin numbers with someone else. The question is: in such an event, would the RVers find the new target, or would they return to their old friend 1234 5678? Either they find the new target, and the sign vocabulary is unstable – if this were ordinary language, it would be an instance of creating a homonymy (one sign with two unrelated meanings). Or they find the old target, and the vocabulary is relatively stable, i.e. less random and more like ordinary language.

This would be an interesting experiment to perform because it has no expected result, and we would learn something by discovering what actually happens. By way of contrast, I shall return later to one experiment that has been carried out, where I feel there was an expected outcome, which did in fact materialize, and from which I learned nothing.

The fact that the tasker setting the target is someone as totally independent as possible of the entire RV procedure reinforces the arbitrariness of this relationship. The selection of targets by computer, intended to add to this distancing effect, also adds a different kind of arbitrariness. This selection decides when a target will be tasked, but not the actual targets, at least not always. (Setting a target may not be necessary for RV in general, but it is necessary for this scientific experiment, for purposes both of checking accuracy and analyzing the process. I am leaving to one side other aspects of protocol such as using pairs of targets.)

A computer can set easy and basically uninteresting targets like the Eiffel Tower. But for others, objects of interest, there must be someone – if not the tasker himself then a ‘taskmaster’ even further in the background – who has at least some idea of its nature, for they would not be objects of interest without an interested party. Now, what constitute areas of interest and what do not is a very subjective issue that no computer worth its salt would touch with a bargepole. This is where the human element, having walked out the front door, slips in the back door. Not only are certain targets set by humans, but we can even somewhat categorize the type of humans in question.

Hence tasking certain asteroids with reference to their origin may sound neutral as to that origin – chosen in order to decide between the conventional gradualist theory (whereby the asteroid belt was formed directly from the primeval dust cloud) and the catastrophist hypothesis of astronomer Tom van Flandern (whereby the asteroid belt was formed much more recently with debris from an exploding planet). But it is not at all neutral with respect to mainstream science, since it is already according far too much credence to van Flandern’s supposedly crazy idea. Mainstream science is not interested in the answer simply because it is not interested in the question. There is nonetheless, however discreet he tries to be, an interested observer who is unwillingly and unwittingly influencing the outcome of the experiment. Asking this question at all is almost tantamount to expecting the alternative theory to be validated.

In other words, the target name/number is a synonym for an existing sign or set of signs for which the tasker has already at least to some degree taken the indirect route through the concept to the thing itself. This is made clear in the above example. In his video at farsight.org, Courtney Brown gives us the lowdown on Tom van Flandern, so as to explain the whole point of targeting 3 otherwise uninteresting asteroids. That is a lot of baggage for a randomly generated number to be carrying around – ‘baggage’ being a neutral term for which ‘hidden agenda’ might sometimes be an appropriate more critical alternative, although, I hasten to add, I am not suggesting any such thing in the case of the Farsight Institute.

Of course the arbitrariness of the sign is a debatable concept anyway, having been subverted in the legitimate ways mentioned above, as well as corrupted in other more nefarious ways, including double-speak, such as would indeed indicate a ‘hidden agenda’. Is war any less violent for being called peace? Does the devil incarnate smell as sulphurous when called Lucifer, the bringer of light? Try telling a concentration camp survivor that a number instead of a name was not dehumanizing. Or for that matter, try telling a Satanist that the number 666 is an arbitrary sign.

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[araucaria]

2. Remote view (concept). The concept, as we saw earlier, is what links the sign indirectly to the real-life object. It relates to the sign by perceiving (reading and interpreting) it, and to the object by somehow experiencing it – normally through the 5 senses. In other words, mentation here has an input (a verbal stimulus), producing an output (a conception phase), leading to a second input (a real-world experience). This process is then somewhat reversed: the real-world experience acts as an input (a sensory stimulus), producing an output (a conception phase), leading to another output (in RV: hard copy drawings/notes), leading back to the original input (i.e. describing the target/completing the task).

This at least is the physical account of how the brain functions. What the brain cannot do, and which something therefore non-physical is accomplishing, has nothing to do with the target. We know that the brain can readily visualize things that are not there, through memory or imagination or technological devices like ‘television’ – as in ‘tele-‘ = remote, ‘vision’ = viewing.

The non-physical accomplishment lies in knowing the meaning of the unintelligible task coordinates, knowing what they denote. In this respect, the line on the left side of the triangle between the task and the concept should also be a broken line; or rather, there should be an incoming broken line and an outgoing continuous line, because the process here involves receiving something inconceivable and sending back a conception of it. But there again, that continuous line is really a broken one too, given that this conception is erroneous (not in its perception of the object per se, but as to the nature of that object and the nature of that perception). This is the error that lends objectivity to what may in fact be a subjective perception: we have no physical way of knowing that the object being viewed is the real target as opposed to some vivid idea or representation of it. We can ‘know’ it in a non-physical way, but we can only share that knowing with someone with ‘military grade’ skills in that area.

While the task coordinates ‘name’ the target, for the RVer they ‘locate’ the target, they supply a spacetime address – an instruction where to look and what to look at. But, just as the name is less arbitrary than it seems, the address is less random than is claimed. Hence, if you extended the use of computers to the entire operation, you would be sending a computer to a computer-generated and transmitted random address, and the computer would then crash or otherwise malfunction, because it cannot second-guess the tasker’s intention; it will literally go to the designated address, and only then if correctly formatted – it has to be a real address in a language the computer understands, as opposed to indecipherable pseudo-code. I said ‘the tasker’s intention’: the tasker claims not to have an intention, but of course he does. It is what guides the remote viewer, for otherwise, the RVer would be no better off than the computer. This is why the SRV (scientific RV) protocol sets so much store by the viewer’s mind being as uncluttered as possible: in order to receive the address from outside.

Something is happening here akin to suddenly understanding a foreign language, or very nearly bypassing language altogether, in other words a form of telepathy, seen as the transfer of an energy pattern between a transmitter and a receiver. Telepathy requires a source, and we have observed how there is basically a source hiding, however discreetly, behind the task coordinates. The experimental protocol requires there to be ideally no (human) source; it would be a mistake to claim that such an ideal can ever be fully attained in obtaining data of interest to humans. This might happen if we stepped out of SRV and there were no coordinates at all and ultimately no target. On the contrary, the more precise the task naming becomes, the more uncluttered is the mind behind the task. Ultimately, this mind will contain nothing but the target and, counterintuitively, the chances of the mind-reader scoring high marks sky-rocket rather than decreasing.

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[araucaria]

3. Object (target). Summarizing the above, the target object is always to some extent in the mind of the taskmaster, who may or may not be the tasker. The arbitrary conventional sign is like his customary illegible signature – whether he scribbled it himself or his PA used a rubber stamp is immaterial. There is potentially nothing, no target object ‘out there’ between the sender and the receiver. In fact there is no ‘out there’ at all, just the sender/receiver himself – and there being no distance to cover, there is no distortion of the message.

In other words, the third side of the triangle is also a broken line, meaning that the concept-object relationship is a conventional one; this is how we perceive perception: as a transitive operation along a continuous line from the brain to the physical object. On the contrary, perception may perhaps better be seen as an intransitive, immaterial operation: the mind does not perceive any thing; it simply perceives. When all three sides of the triangle are reduced to broken lines, the whole triangle collapses into a single point where transmission/reception occurs with no interference.

This does not mean that the transmitted/received content is equatable to some objective truth, merely that the sender and receiver are ‘on the same wavelength’, ‘of like mind’ – have a shared subjectivity.

Hence the results of the 3 asteroids experiment are mere preaching to the choir. They would only surprise the uninterested mainstream scientist not open to van Flandern’s research and whose gradualist theory does not need testing, i.e. cannot be tested comparatively at this time for want of any serious alternative. Furthermore, for that person, testing through RV makes no sense at all, as the method is equally ‘crazy’. The results will not surprise someone open-minded enough to accept both the alternative astronomy and the reality of RV. Since that is also a description of the RV researcher himself, the mere asking of the question is enough to suggest the answer. But the experiment itself proves nothing beyond the experimenter’s expectations, and the RVers have simply read his mind – unanimously, because there was nothing else to view.

For the public receiving this RV result positively, it looks like validation of what they already thought. But it is only alternative science validating alternative science. For anyone else, it looks like validation of what they already thought: alternative science is bunkum. Like a lot of science, this research seems to be telling us what we already know. Fair enough, but this is hardly going to spark a revultion – I meant to write ‘revolution’, but I’ll let the slip of the finger stand :)

All the same, this is not to say that there is no objective reality out there, or that there is an objective reality that has been missed. The best and worst that can be said is that the status of the RV material is undecidable: it may be in some sense factual; then again it may be the work of the imagination, or even a malicious deception. We have no way of knowing, and until we do, always supposing that to be possible, ‘scientific remote viewing’ will remain a misnomer, a mere target or task.

Hence, whatever the merits of remote viewing – including if it is effective as advertised – it is unlikely to lead to any major breakthrough of the kind claimed for the Announcement. Which is not to say that the Announcement will do no good at all…

[chocolate]

Araucaria, from what I understand, Remote viewing is neither true nor false, it is merely subjective. I don't mean to interject your stream, only want to add to it.

As far as I have felt about it, the numbers are a way of agreeing upon, and what is the most important is the skillfulness of the project manager, the one creating the task. Not in terms of how he will word the task, although that matters, but what intention he will insert into it.

Apart from that, I will also leave my opinion about the revelations of 'Master' Courtney ( :) ) open for the moment.

I appreciate your effort to create such thread.

[Slorri]

Thanks Araucaria for this very well investigated topic. Might even have been so well founded that it made me confused.

If I understand this correctly, You ask if there might be a hidden code within the TRN?

We should also know that:
1. RV works just as well without any TRN (Target Reference Number).
2. The TRN does not have to be random. It can just as well be an ordinal number.
3. The reason it is used is to be able to reference the RV sessions to the feedback and the target, within the task. If there was no reference then that could lead to confusion as to where things belong.
4. Someone else than the tasker can create the TRN, even though that other person or random number generator does not know the target.

[araucaria]

You ask if there might be a hidden code within the TRN?

Thanks slorri. I am suggesting that there may be more to a simple number/library reference than meets the eye. Maybe this is what chocolate means by 'intention'. But isn't the TRN system designed precisely to eliminate such effects?

[Ealiss]

You are making my head hurt, lol. Remote viewing is simple. Why not try it? A bunch of us did that ages ago in a new age forum. People would volunteer and say "Can you describe my place of work?" or home or some other thing like that. Not an object, though. You need to be really good to get objects right. And the rest of us would then try, in our minds eye, to see that place. We would type it up and share it and then be told if we were right. We usually got about 75 % right.

I suggest just giving it a go. Trying it may give a lot of answers.

¤=[Post Update]=¤

PS: If someone gave me a number to investigate, I would ask "higher self" or "guide" and they would know and take me where I needed to go.

[Synchronicity]

RV isn't complicated and we all do it to one point or another, although many don't realize it or consciously attempt it. Focusing on a person or place and knowing, seeing, or sensing what some other place or person looks like is part of any distance healing session (and a person can yes, under the right conditions get information from a distance without knowing details) and for that matter, can be part of deciding where to go on vacation or just paying attention to the information our senses give us. Sure, sometimes if we focus on a place with a person in that place we may get information from the person instead of actually only reading a target, but my point is that there are other ways to see things and places remotely than one set of protocols. In the long run, if the information is correct it is correct, although I realize that trying to eliminate all other sources of information is part of the "scientific process".

I am not discounting doing it how he describes and teaches, but just saying that this "skill" is also part of other procedures or events. I remember when my son was in school he mentioned he was going to see his girlfriend. I was thinking about her house later that day (how to get there) and I clearly saw a bedroom. I saw it pretty neat except there was a backpack on the floor next to the desk, and when I saw it I felt really anxious about it being there. It stayed with me all day, and when I picked him up I described the room in detail, including the backpack and the feelings I got from it being on the floor. He hadn't ever told me about her room and had only seen it in passing once, but I described it exactly, down to colors and what was on the wall. I told him about the backpack and my desire to pick it up and the anxiety I felt, and he was obviously startled. He said he would pass that on to her, and when I picked him up he said she had forgotten she left the backpack on the floor, but that her parents were not happy if it was there (expected totally neat room) and she went straight to put it away when he told her what I said.

Now I have seen and felt things my whole life and realize not everyone does that, but it is part of being human. I remember a person we were interviewing, who was in a different location we hadn't discussed, and I kept seeing eyes staring during the whole interview. I was scribbling on a sheet of paper and kept drawing big eyes staring all over the paper. I finally mentioned to her that I kept seeing eyes staring and asked her if that made sense to her, and she was quiet a minute and then said she had big cat posters in her room and realized there were indeed big eyes staring at her from around the room. She wasn't looking at them during the interview and didn't think about them much, but when she thought about it her room was indeed full of staring eyes. Did I get that from her? The room? I could list many other times this has happened, but you get the point.

It isn't just me...many of us can focus on something and if we just trust the bits of information instead of trying to make the whole picture we find we do see more than we realize.

[Synchronicity]

You are making my head hurt, lol. Remote viewing is simple. Why not try it? A bunch of us did that ages ago in a new age forum. People would volunteer and say "Can you describe my place of work?" or home or some other thing like that. Not an object, though. You need to be really good to get objects right. And the rest of us would then try, in our minds eye, to see that place. We would type it up and share it and then be told if we were right. We usually got about 75 % right.

I suggest just giving it a go. Trying it may give a lot of answers.



¤=[Post Update]=¤

PS: If someone gave me a number to investigate, I would ask "higher self" or "guide" and they would know and take me where I needed to go.

Yes, good description of how it can go. Some ask guides or higher self (which I do as well), and sometimes when given just a target number it feels as if I'm going into a tunnel toward the place. It's really easy to get distracted or put our ego into it and start interpreting what we see, which usually ruins the whole session, but 75% is pretty good in my view. I agree objects are harder, too. Having someone put a picture up on a laptop and not look at it, and view that from another room is fun, too. You can also have the person look at it and see if your percentage correct improves, possibly from getting the information from the person.

It's nice to exercise the old brain and senses :)

[chocolate]

You ask if there might be a hidden code within the TRN?

Thanks slorri. I am suggesting that there may be more to a simple number/library reference than meets the eye. Maybe this is what chocolate means by 'intention'. But isn't the TRN system designed precisely to eliminate such effects?


Yes, the number is designed to eliminate the possible connection between the intention of the person asking the question (the one who makes the target), and the one who remotely views the target. The idea is to have the most objective result possible, if that is in any way possible. But yes, RV can be done without a number, too, although than I would call it Out of Body ( :) ) experience.

If I want to RV objects/events/outcomes for myself, to serve me in my life, the best way is to write targets down with corresponding target numbers, several at once, to leave all of them until presumably I forget which number corresponds to which target, and than to pick up and RV one of them at a time. That is how I can eliminate my personal intention, which will only skew the final result, from myself.

As a result of several people engaged in a RV session, the 'subjective-ism' becomes less 'subjective' and more 'objective' because one will notice that several common traits seem to occur. For example if 5 people RV a picture with a mountain, most of them will have some graphic and verbal representation of natural object as mountain, and may be one will see more of a man-made object. So the common trait from the other 4 will be accepted as more accurate to the RV-ed object.

The main purpose of RV is to view a possible 'something' with the help of the least amount of rational 'man-made' thinking, and more intuitive or subconscious mind involved. In a way I see it best described as a conscious Out of Body Observation done by at least 3 people, so you have 3 POV of the same thing.

The whole theory of RV and practice is much more complex, and I am not all that expert in it, so I have shared only what I understand consciously.

[Johnny]

[........]

The whole theory of RV and practice is much more complex, and I am not all that expert in it, so I have shared only what I understand consciously.

Why not, it is much more simple ?? It is all about awareness, and we are able to be aware of a lot of things on several levels, at the same time !!! ( NOW it is complicated :) ) It depends what we focus on. (NOW it is simple again :) )

Cheers Johnny

[Roisin]

Just my own .02 on this topic.

I'm fascinated by numbers which is why I could really relate to that Nic Cage movie "Knowing". From my own experiences and results of my experiments, numbers are either seen or heard so I've known for many, many years that the basic structure of our universe is comprised of numbers.

My higher mind and those intelligences that I work with have indicated this to me over and over again in numerous seemingly inexplicable ways.

Numbers often play a big role in synchonicity's; not to mention how numerology works with that phenomenon too.

Someday, we will know more about how all of this works and will be able to explain it in a coherent manner that will be consistent with the level of quantum physics we will have advanced to at that point in time. Currently, we are not at that stage yet.

When numbers are used in Remote Viewing and in various unstructured clairvoyant exercises too, they allow us to connect with those corresponding numbers in the information we are seeking or in the case of RVing, the "target".

Everything is comprised of numbers and all of the numbers are used only in different orders and sequences. Everything out there has their own unique set of numbers where, many times, the logic of the numeric arrangements are intentionally set that way depending on what the information or target is so that we can understand those arrangements more clearly.

It's up to those other unknown forces to match up those numbers to inform us in one way or the other about the information we are searching for. Some will say it's their higher mind that is assisting in such processes and others will say that there are also other intelligences in the mix too.

Anyway, it's all very fascinating. Ingo Swann knew everything about what I just described above which is why he included the assignment of coordinates to the target in his model of Remote Viewing.

[araucaria]

Thanks everyone for your input. Although the topic is SRV, scientific remote viewing, with all the theorizing that this entails, I am happy to see contributions from practitioners, and I hope you don’t feel too much like the proverbial centipede asked to explain how it walks :) You are not at all off-topic because your ideas add a bit of contrast to the picture.

Synchronicity, I am not interested in visiting untidy rooms, I get enough of that with ordinary stereoscopic vision thank you very much! RV is easy you say. Well, gifted and hard-working practitioners of anything make what they do look easy and it is easy for them now. But what I find most interesting is your emphasis on the fun aspect. RV should be fun, as you say. I feel ‘military grade’ specialists taking time off from looking after weapons-grade plutonium are definitely not too concerned about having fun. Donald Winnicott regarded psychoanalysis as play. I think maybe the players in SRV are in some ways performing psychotherapy, with the remote viewer as the therapist in a state of ‘evenly-suspended attention’ while following the free associations made by his patient, and acting as one ‘supposed to know’, with transference the result. This is not to suggest a mental problem: the idea comes to me from a creative art perspective, where this is seen as an invaluable tool.

I want to keep the focus here on the scientific/theoretical aspect, because this is where Courtney Brown is on topic for a forum ‘where science and spirituality meet’. While it is more than likely that science cannot meet spirituality without making great strides away from what generally passes for science, this would seem to mean that the opposite is also true: that traditional spirituality (as opposed to religion) has work to do to make this possible. Basically, if science needs to include the non-physical, then as a corollary, spirituality needs to become more grounded.

Also, this has a topical aspect in connection with Courtney Brown’s imminent announcement. We need to be as prepared as we can to interpret this in the most positive manner possible, avoiding any pitfalls.

[Synchronicity]

Thanks everyone for your input. Although the topic is SRV, scientific remote viewing, with all the theorizing that this entails, I am happy to see contributions from practitioners, and I hope you don’t feel too much like the proverbial centipede asked to explain how it walks :) You are not at all off-topic because your ideas add a bit of contrast to the picture.

Synchronicity, I am not interested in visiting untidy rooms, I get enough of that with ordinary stereoscopic vision thank you very much! RV is easy you say. Well, gifted and hard-working practitioners of anything make what they do look easy and it is easy for them now. But what I find most interesting is your emphasis on the fun aspect. RV should be fun, as you say. I feel ‘military grade’ specialists taking time off from looking after weapons-grade plutonium are definitely not too concerned about having fun. Donald Winnicott regarded psychoanalysis as play. I think maybe the players in SRV are in some ways performing psychotherapy, with the remote viewer as the therapist in a state of ‘evenly-suspended attention’ while following the free associations made by his patient, and acting as one ‘supposed to know’, with transference the result. This is not to suggest a mental problem: the idea comes to me from a creative art perspective, where this is seen as an invaluable tool.

I want to keep the focus here on the scientific/theoretical aspect, because this is where Courtney Brown is on topic for a forum ‘where science and spirituality meet’. While it is more than likely that science cannot meet spirituality without making great strides away from what generally passes for science, this would seem to mean that the opposite is also true: that traditional spirituality (as opposed to religion) has work to do to make this possible. Basically, if science needs to include the non-physical, then as a corollary, spirituality needs to become more grounded.

Also, this has a topical aspect in connection with Courtney Brown’s imminent announcement. We need to be as prepared as we can to interpret this in the most positive manner possible, avoiding any pitfalls.

I see what you mean by the topic, but that is where I see part of the problem. RV...even SRV...just isn't complicated or mystical unless it is made to be so. And waiting for an announcement that is "scientific" is no different than waiting for anyone else who "sees" things (and has been confirmed to get good results). I guess part of why I don't see why waiting for what he may say is something important and life-changing is that RV isn't really spiritual unless you do it in a spiritual context. Some of what energy workers do is spiritual, but a good part of it just isn't. Funny you mentioned grounding, since that is one big part of RV and energy work as well, and we have been willing to meet science and have reached for it many times to be usually snickered at or ignored...maybe not quite happening at this point, since science isn't just based on data, but on belief systems as well, but there is hope.

But I do see your point on the topic...perhaps I have felt the energies too much from the situation at his end not to feel the human issues that are around it. There is much human related to this announcement...enough said on my part:)

[Ealiss]

Well put, Synchronicity. :)

I do feel also that the human related part is perhaps the main thing.

[chocolate]

Thanks everyone for your input. Although the topic is SRV, scientific remote viewing, with all the theorizing that this entails, I am happy to see contributions from practitioners, and I hope you don’t feel too much like the proverbial centipede asked to explain how it walks :) You are not at all off-topic because your ideas add a bit of contrast to the picture.

Synchronicity, I am not interested in visiting untidy rooms, I get enough of that with ordinary stereoscopic vision thank you very much! RV is easy you say. Well, gifted and hard-working practitioners of anything make what they do look easy and it is easy for them now. But what I find most interesting is your emphasis on the fun aspect. RV should be fun, as you say. I feel ‘military grade’ specialists taking time off from looking after weapons-grade plutonium are definitely not too concerned about having fun. Donald Winnicott regarded psychoanalysis as play. I think maybe the players in SRV are in some ways performing psychotherapy, with the remote viewer as the therapist in a state of ‘evenly-suspended attention’ while following the free associations made by his patient, and acting as one ‘supposed to know’, with transference the result. This is not to suggest a mental problem: the idea comes to me from a creative art perspective, where this is seen as an invaluable tool.

I want to keep the focus here on the scientific/theoretical aspect, because this is where Courtney Brown is on topic for a forum ‘where science and spirituality meet’. While it is more than likely that science cannot meet spirituality without making great strides away from what generally passes for science, this would seem to mean that the opposite is also true: that traditional spirituality (as opposed to religion) has work to do to make this possible. Basically, if science needs to include the non-physical, then as a corollary, spirituality needs to become more grounded.

Also, this has a topical aspect in connection with Courtney Brown’s imminent announcement. We need to be as prepared as we can to interpret this in the most positive manner possible, avoiding any pitfalls.

Perfect post, I could say, and very familiar feeling in it. I just happened to write much of the same.

That put aside for the moment, RV is nothing less than complex, but to take it in a scientific way one needs to discuss the base of quantum physics, psychology, biology, electro-magnetism as part of Newtonian physics, an probably several more branches of science.
To find the spiritual aspect of it, one needs to visit the Out of body thread in Spirituality on the forum (I am getting familiar with one of them at present here: http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?52121-OBEs-What-are-they-how-to-make-them-happen-and-where-does-the-Higher-Self-fit-in), and finally, we need a supercomputer, as Carmody's brain for example :) , to meet the two aspects.

I hope it will be of use to post few easier to digest videos, one here:
UT3cE_YqwWs

Araucaria, artist people, we indeed do RV all the time, we just don't label it like that. If you visit TraineeHuman's OBE thread (the link in the text above the video), he has a few posts with practical ways of creative thinking through RV, or from the perspective of psychology and the way our mind operates. The useful posts are at the start of the thread, somewhere around page 10 or so. There is also a direct reference between OBE and RV.
Just mentioning, in case anyone feels compelled to investigate.

I can't make anyone see, but the least I can do is just point in some direction that seems right to me.

[Ealiss]

Forgive me, but to do remote viewing is as easy as sitting down, closing your eyes and see. There are no complicated steps to take. No complicated scientific elements in it. People don't have to be super human.

It seems to me, that those who can do remote viewing keep telling you how simple it is and yet those who can't do it, keeps telling us how complicated it is.

[chocolate]

Forgive me, but to do remote viewing is as easy as sitting down, closing your eyes and see. There are no complicated steps to take. No complicated scientific elements in it. People don't have to be super human.

It seems to me, that those who can do remote viewing keep telling you how simple it is and yet those who can't do it, keeps telling us how complicated it is.

That is probably true, but it is only one of the possibilities :).

I do it(RV) all the time, and I do feel it is not as simple as you say it is. And if you think RV is just simply closing your eyes and seeing, you should research a bit more, I would say.
To start off, in RV session the eyes should be kept open at all times. Just stating one of the rules that are a part of the protocol.

There was the saying 'the more I know the more I realize how little I know', or something in that fashion.

Cheers.

PS. This is not a thread I have started, but apart from that, it is a great one, and I would greatly appreciate, if it could be kept in its original form, and with the initial intention in mind.
It is a matter of respect and understanding.
Thank you all in advance.

[chocolate]

Throwing some quantum physics in:
hm5L8z34sNg

[Ealiss]

Chocolate, reading your PS, I am not trying to leave the topic at hand or send it off on a tangent. I hope everyone understands that. I am simply trying to help clarify and explain what it is. And it is quite simple in my experience.

But by all means, I will leave the discussion to those who prefer to make it very complicated and not interfere with the discussion on the huge and almost insurmountable complexities if this is what this thread is supposed to be about. :biggrin:

[chocolate]

Ealiss, I am not trying to explain to anyone anything, just giving my share of what I know from practical, scientific and spiritual perspective.

Quote:

Although the topic is SRV, scientific remote viewing, with all the theorizing that this entails
[...]

I want to keep the focus here on the scientific/theoretical aspect, because this is where Courtney Brown is on topic for a forum ‘where science and spirituality meet’. While it is more than likely that science cannot meet spirituality without making great strides away from what generally passes for science, this would seem to mean that the opposite is also true: that traditional spirituality (as opposed to religion) has work to do to make this possible. Basically, if science needs to include the non-physical, then as a corollary, spirituality needs to become more grounded.

Also, this has a topical aspect in connection with Courtney Brown’s imminent announcement. We need to be as prepared as we can to interpret this in the most positive manner possible, avoiding any pitfalls.

More clear than that I don't know how to say it.

[chocolate]

sN9nIMgdpuw

and probably this:

17JlNRPKOGI

[Wind]

I haven't seen this one before... RV is a very fascinating phenomenon, Courtney Brown seems to be very passionate about it and I think that he is quite a sincere person.

Jw8uX76lPHc

Dick Allgire is said to be a very good remote viewer.

2sTfhFUemf4
K7xslY5kGAk
1qHBxkSv0Xc
0DoJDuJ4VfA

Here is one full session though the subject is not very pleasant. I hope that these videos fit the topic!

rqcn1JmqHpo

[Roisin]

Because there are so many here interested in RVing, maybe we could set up our own sessions here in this forum? Would anyone be interested in doing that?

I've participated in other forums in the past in Remote Viewing and here's how it works.
Someone picks out a photo with coordinates inserted in the corner of that image and saves it at a file sharing place that also time-stamps that file at the exact time it is saved.

Then we each do our own RV session on that target and post our sketchings and/or descriptions on what's in the target. Then a day or so later, the photo is revealed.

Then, someone else in the group will assign coordinates to another photo and so on. We rotate.

I've participated in numerous such exercises in other forums over the years and they're a lot of fun!

But one thing is certain, no one can truly understand Remote Viewing unless they themselves practice at it all the time.

Those who have decent hit rates know Remote Viewing because if one is successful at identifying significant details of their targets on a relatively consistent basis, this is an indication that that person has mastered those techniques required of RV viewers to be successful at it. This takes practice, and a lot of it. This is why at the Olympics, for example, we only see those former figure skating medal winners analyzing those competitions on the air for network television during those games. The reason why is because they know all about figure skating inside and out at a much more advanced level than anyone who is not a high ranking figure skating competitor.

[Ealiss]

Roisin, I have never done a map. Only places. I did try and find a few missing persons and solve a murder but that was with all the psychic senses and not just RV. Even if I make a fool of myself, I have no problem giving it a go.

[Roisin]

I'm not very good at remote viewing yet but I know if I practice at it all the time, I will eventually improve. Your psychic abilities sound better than mine are and it goes without saying that there are many here who claim to have psychic abilities which is not surprising because psychic development often times is a side-effect of spiritual development too. It should be stated though that one does not need any demonstrable psychic abilities in any area to become a successful Remote Viewer. In fact, the whole beauty behind Remote Viewing is that anyone can be trained to become proficient at it, at least to some extent. But like anything else, this only comes after one practices at it. ;)

Like you, I'm not afraid to practice at Remote Viewing in a more or less public venue because I'm not afraid to fail. This is why I have posted some of my predictions in that members prediction thread. My attitude is if you get a hit that's great but it that doesn't happen then that's fine too. It's all about practicing and getting better at it and no one should be criticized for at least trying.

To get started with this, we need at least one more person for our first run at it. Hope someone else here will want to join in on the fun too!

If no one else joins by the end of today, then you and I can just start off with a run and take it from there. :)

------
For anyone who wants to participate in these RV sessions, please sign up at Dropbox which is a file sharing website that timestamps each file that is saved.

Here's a link to that site: https://www.dropbox.com

No other file sharing site will be permitted for these sessions.

Here's how this works:

At the beginning of each session, the designated "taskmaster" uploads a photo of their chosen target with 2 sets of four numbers for the coordinates inserted in a corner of that image into their "Dropbox" folder. This can be a photo from the internet or a photo that they captured of an object or scene with their cellphone or cam.

Here's a good random number generator: http://www.random.org/integers/

Example showing the 2 sets of coordinates inserted in a corner of a "target" image:
http://i932.photobucket.com/albums/ad164/A99_x/dolphin.jpg (http://s932.photobucket.com/user/A99_x/media/dolphin.jpg.html)

Then they notify the group that the target is ready where they also post those coordinates for that run too in that same post. They should also post their local time in that post too.

Viewers then have 24 hrs to conduct their own RV session for that target. Once that's completed, the viewer then posts their sketches and/or descriptions of the target here in this thread.

After the viewing period has ended, the taskmaster then will:
-- post their local time to indicate that the 24 hr. viewing period is up.
-- post the target photo in this thread
-- include a screenshot showing the date and time that file was saved in their "Dropbox" folder. That information is shown in their dropbox folder when one clicks on that image when in that folder.
-- include a link to that Dropbox file for participants to access.
Here's an example of a screenshot of that dolphin image that I just uploaded to a folder I created at Dropbox entitled with todays date:
http://i932.photobucket.com/albums/ad164/A99_x/rv_timestamp.jpg (http://s932.photobucket.com/user/A99_x/media/rv_timestamp.jpg.html)

Then, after that's done, a new person is designated as "taskmaster" and we start all over again.

[Ealiss]

Roisin, I already have drop box but I am not comfortable allowing access to a lot of people I don't know. Not to my private dropbox. I will be fine with the screenshot of the time the file was posted, without having access to the dropbox.

It sounds like we need a new thread? To do this separately.

[Roisin]

Hi, if you are not comfortable with providing a Dropbox link here to that image for others to access then you do not have to do that.

But it is important that you post the image here when the 24 hr viewing period is up and post a screenshot from the folder that you created in dropbox showing the the image and the time it was first uploaded to that site.


----
Yes, we should start up a new thread on this. I'll do that in a few minutes. :)

[Roisin]

Here's the link to that Remote Viewing Practice thread I just created for our sessions:
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?69142-Remote-Viewing-Practice-Thread&p=805364#post805364

[araucaria]

I’m glad to see an RV practice thread has been started, and hope participants have great fun with that. Practice and theory go hand in hand, and how they do so is an important area to explore in connection both with any particular practice and any given theory. However, in this thread the emphasis is on theory.

Some posters here have notices similarities with other phenomena. Some such often takes place on the Here and Now thread when posts strike readers of them as somehow knowing what they are up to. When this happens to my posts, there is no visual element whatsoever, so for me the effect is sufficiently different from RV to be kept apart in any analysis. For me personally, it is more to do with creative writing, for others it may be something else. Many of us on this forum are practiced in something of this sort, so we may have enough practical experience without having tried a given protocol.

The purpose of theory is not necessarily to establish something’s existence: we can theorize about language. Nor is it necessarily to explain how something works, although this is part of it, and there can be a lot of explaining to do, but you eventually move on to research into how the technique can be developed beyond what is known. Theory has another function however: it serves to evaluate, in other words to keep people honest. We do this all the time on the forum, finding out what people can legitimately state, and when (and why) their material starts becoming dodgy. When the crunch comes, the honest ones will back off and accept there is a problem, while the dishonest ones are shown up for what they are.

As someone stated above, quantum physics and such things can indeed be applied to RV. However, these are tools used by the Farsight Institute itself, and I imagine Courtney Brown could run rings round someone like myself in such areas. Hence for an independent evaluation of SRV, I have to bring my own toolbox. I feel more comfortable in my own area of expertise, which is language. Semiotics as the science of sign systems is notably concerned with language, it being the major sign system, and can also be applied to SRV to the extent that it involves communication through signs.

Spoken language is one area that everyone will find fairly easy, and many will say the same for written language. However, much of your schooling was in the theory of language: grammar and syntax, later perhaps poetry and rhetoric, and for specialists, semantics, logic, phonology, etymology and various other disciplines known collectively as linguistics. Hence any proficiency one may have is the result of some talent and not a little hard work. Most people have only a working knowledge of their language, which means that they can unwittingly create problems, while others possibly more skilled can create problems deliberately as well. You sometimes need language theory to avoid these pitfalls, in addition to specialist theory in the given field. That is what I can bring to the table.

Why is this important in addition, of course, to the need to verify, if necessary debunk or qualify, or blow the whistle? Since a website is exclusively tied, in its physical dimension, to the written word, then a more proficient, and more creative use of that medium can only be beneficial to the site and its users. By creative I mean here poetry – for an exploratory purpose – as opposed to rhetoric – serving an agenda.

Which brings me back to Courtney Brown. His big announcement, preceded by numerous Implications postings, relies heavily on the rhetorical device called suspense, just as Agatha Christie will only reveal the culprit in the final chapter, after leaving a string of clues. And likewise, I see his protocols as being rhetorical: serving an agenda in the sense of seeking corroboration, setting a target and achieving it, with the background goal of establishing RV as being for real. This is basic to the scientific method, I know. But the scientific method requires falsifiability, and this is possibly being lost when the quality of RVers is assessed in terms of their concordance with a determined task. The better they are, the closer we come to circular logic, and the farther we get from the notion of RV as a grassroots fun activity that immediately stirred the creation of a practice thread.

Theory itself is scientifically rhetorical, when it seeks to explain what already exists, but only up to a point, when it branches off into exploration; it then becomes poetical, or creative. Creativity always needs this serious technical basis. A poet can write soulful sonnets, but only once he has learnt how to make a poem scan. But creativity is not necessarily fiction, make-believe or pure poetry. On the contrary, when Here and Nowers are being creative, they are reaching others’ 3D reality. My analysis at the start of this thread is probably limited to the rhetorical side of Courtney Brown’s work; if anything is to come of his announcement, it will be the outcome of a creative process. In other words, I might imagine the RV technique being used to predict a 3D reality for which hard evidence is subsequently discovered. If this is what is going on, we need to verify that process; it could after all be serving an agenda, meaning that the evidence was planted and the ‘prediction’ was actually an after-the-event description.

Here is another approach to what I am trying to say about theory and practice, from the Here and Now thread.


Hi Christine
I see this thread as an incredible experiment in collective writing. I remember back in the eighties, long before the Internet, when this was a theoretical subject for intellectuals – what you had was heavyweight theory with lightweight practice. Of course back then, there were huge issues of leadership, exacerbated by material concerns such as who got to wield the piece of chalk, and it involved a highly structured discourse which I would call architectural in the sense that it called for planning and engineering to hold things together. Ego issues were theorized in terms of Mallarmé’s ‘disparition élocutoire’, whereby the writer as speaker disappears, leaving the initiative to the words themselves, but these issues were never resolved in practice, for you cannot leave your individuality at the door, precisely because it is your personal creative power that you need to bring to the table.

What we have here and now is a more relaxed stream-of-consciousness format which I would describe as organic rather than architectural. Individuals branch out wherever they see an opening, ideas grow, and structural unity is effortless because of the shared DNA; it is not hidebound by any predefined ideal shape. If it were a tree, it would be a hybrid, like a citrus, with oranges and lemons, tangerines and clementines all growing off the same trunk. Here we can achieve that community of individualities where the writer as speaker truly does disappear, leaving the initiative to the words themselves, in the sense that you are what you say, but you are also more than that, you have your secrets too, things not to be spoken and things simply left unsaid because not everything is possible or timely and appropriate. At least not yet: we have come 1818 pages to be told that Ulli is a great greeter
:)

[Roisin]

I think all super-sensible activities involve the practitioner's ability to tap into the vastly uncharted ocean of the primordial unconscious mind (Paul Tillich); an information stream that is the unconscious collective mind of humanity and those intelligences that reside in those realms outside of the physical.

But RVing, being an uniquely American invention, naturally chose to sanitize and package the ability of clairvoyance in such a way to appeal to the rational and scientific mind-set of of people who wouldn't dream of engaging in practices to develop their psychic skills outside of a paradigm that was not infused with scientific jargon. So yes, linguistics DOES play a significant role in all of this.

For this reason I've always found Remote Viewing rather amusing in that regard and I think Ingo Swann was an absolute genius to come up with . lol

[Curt]

This is fascinating. I didn't have any interest in remote viewing before reading this. And I have to admit, I'm barely able to skim the surface of what you're saying. At least so far.

But I'm really enjoying this.

It strikes me that this topic is an entry-point for understanding something even more important about the nature of reality, perception and meaning.

It takes us past language and hints at a universe created through a giant and endless string of analogies, where each thing refers to something 'else'.

It suggests that everything 'is' metaphor.

And the idea that signs are not random, cannot be purely random is something that makes intuitive sense to me.

Words aren't random signifiers. Poetry wouldn't exist if they were.

I may be way off the mark here.

But wow, this has tickled my imagination.

[araucaria]

Thank you Curtis for that insightful post. Metaphor is everywhere: it is oneness experiencing twoness, and at the same time twoness experiencing oneness (one thing seen in terms of another and hence their commonality). What seemed random in the singular becomes meaningful in the dual by virtue of the connection thus made.

Here’s an example. One day I was stuck at a traffic light with cars on either side. It suddenly occurred to me to wonder what were the chances of having two cars displaying the same four-figure number. Almost immediately, I saw two such cars. Evidently my unconscious perceptions had been working faster than my conscious thought. The point here being that a meaningful thought was almost literally sparked by two randomly numbered vehicles randomly coming together. And by another metaphor today, those four-figure numbers are being linked to Courtney Brown’s target coordinates and spawning another meaningful thought. Metaphor within metaphor.

Randomness has no plural, but it has a dual: two random events are a coincidence, but beyond two you are supposed to freak out. Or you call them synchronicities, another manifestation of metaphor.

[Curt]

I like the way you've described metaphor here, as 'seeing one thing in terms of another'.

And I also like your explanation of synchronicity as yet another expression of metaphor. That's an insight I plan on taking directly to the bank.

But, without taking the thread too far afield, I have a quick question re: the arbitrariness of signs.

...'Smaller segments than words can also lose their arbitrariness. For instance, the letter (sound) ‘j’ beginning a word, although seemingly meaningless, tends far more often than it should to designate some kind of sharp, direct action – as in jab, jangle, jam, jar, jeer, jerk, jiggle, jilt, jive, jolt, jump etc.'

In the example you gave above, the 'J' sound has come to be associated with sharp action.

It seems easy to see where, once the ball had gotten rolling on 'J' being used for this purpose, it might easily continue, gathering more and more steam until it becomes the go-to sound for expressing a certain type of action.

But my question is this: was the first utterance of the 'J' sound in expressing this type of direct action arbitrary at all?

Or was it uttered in that first instance because it was some sort of Platonic ideal naturally suited to expressing sharp, direct action?

[araucaria]

@Curtis:
I think many basic meanings have their origins in sounds - for various reasons. J is in itself quite a sharp, harsh sound. But take a word like mama: you will find the M in many languages, no doubt because it is the sound you obtain naturally by activating your vocal cords when your mouth is shut: the air comes through the nose until you open your mouth, and the lip position then determines the sound. Then you learn to open your mouth quicker, and you end up saying papa (again a sound used in many languages) But then you have disengaged the vocal cords. Meanwhile, your mother, whom you have been studying, has been doing both, and her words comes out as baba, baby, bébé or whatever.

So, arbitrary sounds? Probably not. Sounds are more or less difficult, so I suspect there is a learning curve, starting with easy words using easy sounds. Some sounds are so difficult that even a few native speakers may never master them (lisp etc.).

[araucaria]

In my above opening posts of March 5th I drew three triangles, or 2D pyramids. Since Courtney’s announcement was about the pyramids, I claim an RV hit :)

And since Courtney’s announcement was about SRV itself, and my pyramids refer to SRV itself, I claim a second hit :)

And since my conclusion regarding the collapsing pyramid also appears to have been correct:

‘Hence, whatever the merits of remote viewing – including if it is effective as advertised – it is unlikely to lead to any major breakthrough of the kind claimed for the Announcement.’ I claim a triple whammy :)

Regarding the crumbling pyramid – which, remember, is the infamous hierarchical basis for the all-seeing eye – I want to return to material I have already quoted elsewhere:


In books like Ishmael or Beyond Civilization, Daniel Quinn describes the killer meme of ‘civilization’ in various terms, such as Takers, Hierarchalism, Pyramid builders etc. ‘Lost’ civilizations like the Maya, he says, did not disappear but simply walked away from this model, just as we now need to walk away into what he calls a New Tribal Revolution.


Daniel Quinn teaches that no single person is going to save the world. Rather (if it’s saved at all), it will be saved by millions (and ultimately billions) of us living a new way. A thousand living a new way won’t cause the dominant world order to topple. But that thousand will inspire a hundred thousand, who will inspire a million, who will inspire a billion – and then that world order will begin to look shaky! (p.152)

What Quinn describes as the killer meme is that ‘civilization must continue at ANY cost and not be abandoned under ANY circumstance’. The cure is dead simple: the Maya for example, who are supposed to have simply vanished, actually just walked away from what they were building when they no longer liked it. They had been building new pyramids over old pyramids for thousands of years.

The worker hordes who built the pyramids of Mesoamerica were not more miserable than the ones who the pyramids of Egypt. The workers of Mesoamerica merely perceived themselves as having an alternative to misery, which they eventually exercised (by walking away). We didn’t, so we slogged on, building a ziggurat here, a Great Wall there, a bastille here, a Maginot Line there–and on and on and on–to the present moment, when our pyramids are not being built at Giza or Saqqara but rather at Exxon and Du Pont and Coca Cola and Proctor & Gamble and McDonald’s.
I visit many classrooms, and the students one way or another always bring me round to a point where I ask how many of them are champing at the bit to get out there and start working on the pyramids their parents worked on throughout their lives and their parents before them. The question makes them uneasy, because they know they’re supposed to be absolutely thrilled at the prospect of going out there to flip burgers and pump gas and stock shelves in the real world. Everyone’s told them they’re the luckiest kids on earth–parents, teachers, textbooks–and they feel disloyal not waving their hands at me. But they don’t. (p.51) Walking away from the pyramid is not that easy because it involves leaving behind things we consider most sacred, including heritage that we invest heavily in preserving at all costs. Stay tuned.

[araucaria]

Life is about moving on, and the well-nigh indestructible pyramids are the ultimate in jamming on the brakes. That they have spawned a myriad theories and remain hypnotically fascinating merely serves to mask the fact that life is about moving on.

We find the same thing with MH370: a moving object has been stopped in its tracks, and this too has spawned a myriad theories and has become hypnotically fascinating.

Our museums are full of this sort of stuff: indeed that is what they are for. No sooner was the Berlin War pulled down than museums were seeking to purchase pieces for display. The most interesting bits had artwork on the western side.
http://www.memorial-caen.fr/mur_de_berlin/expocybu06.htm

So when the concrete starts crumbling, they will have to think about preserving it somehow. Sounds crazy? Well, it doesn’t sound quite so crazy when you consider that the same is happening with our art treasures; but maybe that’s a mistake. These artistic chunks of wall are highly paradoxical items, signifying freedom on a support that seen from the other side stood for an end to freedom. We cannot separate the one from the other, so for the sake of the one we keep the other as well. Much great art, being likewise a contestation of the wall on which it is mounted, bears similarities to a window, letting in light and air and the otherwise invisible. But it still marks the boundary between an inside and an outside. Total freedom means walking through a door and being outside, rather than depicting the outside from inside. Hence less art is more art.

Take Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps the greatest artist of the last millennium and whose tiny output makes his works even more precious. And yet paradoxically, much of his work was unfinished. Vasari in his Lives of the Artists, tries to explain:

Clearly, it was because of his profound knowledge of painting that Leonardo started so many things without finishing them; for he was convinced that his hands, for all their skill, could never perfectly express the subtle and wonderful ideas of his imagination. Among his many interests was included the study of nature; he investigated the properties of plants and then observed the motions of the heavens, the path of the moon, and the course of the sun. This segment contains a paradox and an apparent non sequitur. It is paradoxical for a ‘profound knowledge of painting’ to lead to unfinished work; and what has his imagination to do with nature after close examination? Answer: nature is profoundly unfinished and painting in its adequate relationship to nature will also be so.

Take a work that has spawned a myriad theories and remains hypnotically fascinating (it cropped up again only the other day on this forum): The Last Supper. I am going to offer one of my own: you read it here first. Here is Vasari:


Leonardo also executed in Milan, for the Dominicans of Santa Maria delle Grazie, a marvelous and beautiful painting of the Last Supper. Having depicted the heads of the Apostles full of splendour and majesty, he deliberately left the head of Christ unfinished, convinced he would fail to give it the divine spirituality it demands. This all but finished work has ever since been held in the greatest veneration by the Milanese and others. In it Leonardo brilliantly succeeded in envisaging and reproducing the tormented anxiety of the Apostles to know who had betrayed their master; so in their faces one can read the emotions of love, dismay, and anger, or rather sorrow, at their failure to grasp the meaning of Christ. And this excites no less admiration than the contrasted spectacle of the obstinacy, hatred, and treachery in the face of Judas or, indeed, than the incredible diligence with which every detail of the work was executed. The texture of the very cloth on the table is counterfeited so cunningly that the linen itself could not look more realistic.
It is said that the prior used to keep pressing Leonardo, in the most importune way, to hurry up and finish the work, because he was puzzled by Leonardo’s habit of sometimes spending half a day at a time contemplating what he had done so far; if the prior had had his way, Leonardo would have toiled like one of the labourers hoeing in the garden and never put his brush down for a moment. Not satisfied with this, the duke was constrained to send for Leonardo and very tactfully, question him about the painting, although he showed perfectly well that he was only doing so because of the prior’s insistence. Leonardo, knowing he was dealing with a prince of acute and discerning intelligence, was willing (as he never had been with the prior) to explain his mind at length; and so he talked to the duke for a long time about the art of painting. He explained that men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least; for, he added, they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect ideas which they subsequently express and reproduce with their hands. Leonardo then said that he still had two heads to paint: the head of Christ was one, and for this he was unwilling to look for any human model, nor did he dare suppose that his imagination could conceive the beauty and divine grace that properly belonged to the incarnate Deity. Then, he said, he had yet to do the head of Judas, and this troubled him since he did not think he could imagine all the features that would form the countenance of a man who, despite all the blessings he had been given, could so cruelly steel his will to betray his own master and the Creator of the world. However, added Leonardo, he would try to find a model for Judas, and if he did not succeed in doing so, why then he was not without the head of that tactless and importunate prior. The duke roared with laughter at this and said that Leonardo had every reason in the world for saying so. The unfortunate prior retired in confusion to worry the labourers working in his garden, and he left off worrying Leonardo, who skilfully finished the head of Judas and made it seem the very embodiment of treachery and inhumanity. The head of Christ remained, as was said, unfinished. This story suggests a number of observations:
· The usual ‘love & light’ approach to the subject is the Last Supper as the institution of the Eucharist, which may be seen as an approximation of the immaterial Christ presence in the physical. Instead of this, Leonardo seems to be focussing on the dark conspiracy side: the moment of betrayal. No one ever seems to comment on this strange fact.
· The unfinished in this painting denotes the spiritual, invisible aspect of nature: Christ’s features; while the finished denotes the physical, and especially in its betrayal of the spiritual. At the instant captured in the picture, everyone has a conscience to examine as a possible or partial traitor. The only fully clear conscience belongs to one whose head is only sketched in.
· The spiritual applied to the art of painting involves lengthy meditation, studying what has been done so far. The physical viewing of this process leads to impatience at seeing a man watching paint dry!
· This physical view of the process is the ultimate betrayal, hence the viewer might lend his features to a passable portrayal of Judas. In other words, betrayal and portrayal do not just sound similar, they are almost synonymous.
At this point, we may factor in what we know from elsewhere, namely the fact that the painting started deteriorating almost immediately upon completion and why. Fresco painting like this requires a special technique. To adhere properly, the paint must be applied to wet plaster, and as plaster dries very quickly, the painting is divided up into squares, and the painter still has to work very fast to finish one square before it dries. Clearly the prior was upset because even he could see that Leonardo was going about it in the wrong way and asking for trouble by deliberately taking his time.

Since it is hard to imagine one of the greatest artists the world has seen guilty of such gross incompetence, and in a sense betraying his art, we need to find another explanation that takes into account the presence of a genius at work. This explanation follows fairly logically from all the above, and would be more obvious if it didn’t sound quite so crazy. Simply this: the painting was designed not to last. Christ’s unpainted other-worldly features would disappear first; his followers’ would naturally take a little longer, but possibly no longer than their real-life counterparts. We need to remember this was the monks’ refectory (dining hall), and the scene would be like adding on a table at the end of the room. In other words, the monks would feel they were themselves apostles participating in that last supper, especially if they saw their own features in them. Eventually the painted bread and wine would disappear too, leaving just the real bread and wine in the here and now. There is something slightly heretical about showing the effacement of the betrayal in the dining-room rather than the chapel, sending a very different message from the love & light version of the Eucharist celebrated there. And yet, the whole point of experiencing Christ, his presence, death and ascension, may be said to be learning to see his physical absence as an abiding presence.

That is exactly what Leonardo’s ephemeral pigments were designed to show, and that is why all subsequent restorations were dreadfully botched and ultimately a betrayal in principle. The painting was intended to reenact that mystery by itself fading away, and for all the subsequent daubs, it has largely succeeded in that intention.

What then should be done with The Last Supper? Let it fade into nothingness at last. No more betrayal. [Sacrilege!]

And the pyramids? Letting them crumble has taken too long, and so has quarrying building materials. Maybe a few tons of TNT? Nah, no violence. Let’s just forget the whole thing and move on shall we? [Coverup!]

Some day we may get better at disappearing unwanted items. We are not very good at garbage disposal generally and have a word for stuff that is altogether beyond us at this time: ultimate waste. The pyramids are the ultimate cultural waste we don’t want to throw out; instead we are piling up more and drowning under it all. We need to learn to do the opposite. So far we seem capable of shifting a Boeing, which was quite impressive, except that it was by no means garbage. We can do better than that.