Starting Out
When I first looked into remote viewing I was excited to see that there was a how-to manual (the CRV manual). I was quickly disappointed to find that it was mostly an external method of data recording that offered only a limited insight into the internal processes of viewing. There were courses available but they seemed expensive and they were all based on CRV as the data collecting model. I was hoping for more of a do-it-yourself yoga sutra for the Western world.
“The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali” is a very old Sanskrit text which is a highly condensed operating manual for learning supernormal powers. In fact, in one edition of it that I have, the subtitle of Book III is “Supernormal powers”. As I said it is very condensed, perhaps like a course syllabus for advanced yoga teachers. It wasn’t quite a do-it-yourself manual either. Also, the sutras use words like dhyana, dharana, samadhi and samyama that lose a lot in translation, thus the desire for a take on the subject that was more native to the Western/modern world.
I forgot about remote viewing for a while. Later I came back to it when I found the Ten Thousand Roads practice gallery and the forum. I was encouraged to try the “Just do it” method. My previous experience in meditation proved to be helpful in shifting into the right mind-state, and I found that “Just do it” was the only instruction I needed.
After a while I came across something that I could think of as a yoga sutra for the west. In a topic on the TKR forum about RV Tips, “Banded_Krait” recommended reading chapter 21 of “Mental Radio” by Upton Sinclair. That chapter was written by Sinclair’s wife, Mary Craig. It provides a very insightful description of the skills and inner processes involved. This husband and wife team were interested in investigating telepathy and structured their experiments accordingly. Remote viewers will recognized the similarity between these sessions and an RV session. Mary Craig notes that her insights apply to both telepathy and clairvoyance. Remote viewing would involve the same inner skills within a double-blind protocol.
The Sinclair-Craig experiments reflect the telepathy experiments of the early 20th century. They used sketches as targets, with the goal of having the percipient (the viewer) recreate the sketch. In RV, a target may also be represented in words, photos, or geo coordinates. A viewer will express their impressions in any medium they are fluent in, words being very common.
Mary Craig’s chapter has many personal observations of the interactions of subconscious-mind, conscious-mind and deep-mind that the remote viewer will often find to be relevant to their own experience. She describes what might be called an ERV method (extended remote viewing) which has less external structure than CRV.
From Patanjali, we know that the core skill of remote viewing is the result of samyama applied to the light of higher perception. What does this mean? Mary Craig’s insights are a clear commentary on that particular sutra.
–Dan
