New Realities recorded on May 15, 2012
Summary
Alan Steinfeld interviews Russell Targ, a physicist and co-founder of the Stanford Research Institute’s remote viewing program. They discuss Targ’s book, “The Reality of ESP,” the scientific evidence for psychic abilities, non-local spacetime, and the implications of these phenomena for our understanding of consciousness and reality. Targ shares various anecdotes and experiments, including his work with the CIA and police departments, to illustrate the power and potential of remote viewing and psychic healing.
Transcript
Alan Steinfeld
Welcome to New Realities. This is Alan Steinfeld. And this program is about the exploration of who we are in our ultimate human potential, how we are evolving as individuals and a collective civilization. And tonight’s guest is someone who’s contributed in a huge way for understanding human potential. His name is Russell Targ. He’s one of the founders of the remote viewing program for the Stanford Research Institute. He’s written many books and his latest book is called The Reality of ESP: A Physicist’s Proof of Psychic Abilities. Thank you, Russell, for being on New Realities once again.
Russell Targ
Very happy to be with you, Alan.
Alan Steinfeld
Yes. And our video of me remote viewing at your home in Palo Alto has now become a classic for me anyway and for others who want to know about remote viewing. What’d you say?
Russell Targ
I think it got a lot of attention. That’s on my website, which is espresearch.com, if you want to see Alan in the flesh being psychic. I have a little clip of him describing my object of the day.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, what was so amazing was that you really taught me how to remote view, how to open up to let’s call it ESP, whatever you want to call it, in like five minutes. I really got it. So…
Russell Targ
Well, the reason I’m still running around teaching psychic abilities is that it’s empowering for people to learn that there’s more to life than they are just meat and potatoes. They can really expand their awareness and describe and experience things that are far away from their physical body. And when they get good at that, they get the idea that there must be more to them than just a physical body. And you don’t have to pay me lots of money or eat porridge at my feet. I’m just showing you that you already have the ability. I’m giving you permission to be… I’m giving you permission to make use of the ESP you already have.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, exactly. And I know in this book you go through lots of scientific studies and proof. But I think for this audience and for me personally, I already know it’s a truth. I know it’s a reality. I’ve done it. I’ve seen it. I have intuitions all the time. I use my unpolished ability, remote view situations and tune into people. So for me, it’s a reality. And so I would love to hear you talk about what you think a new scientific paradigm can be that would include this kind of, let’s call psychic phenomena.
Russell Targ
Well, what’s new in the book, the reason I wrote a ninth book on psychic abilities is that we’re no longer talking about the evidence for ESP or searching for ESP. It’s unusual for a physicist to say he’s proved anything. But the proof for ESP is so strong that it would be statistically unreasonable to deny it. So I’m now going around as a physicist with decades of experience in laser research. And I can say the evidence for ESP is stronger than the NIH evidence saying you should take an aspirin to prevent a heart attack. Our statistical evidence is 10 times as strong as what the NIH had for aspirin.
Alan Steinfeld
I know. I’m totally convinced. And so the question I’m asking is it’s true, but now how do you create an expanded physicist model, an expanded view of science that would include that as part of its general character?
Russell Targ
I know the answer to that. We live in a wonderful new expansive universe called a non-local space time that physicists are now accepting, was first proposed by Erwin Schrödinger in the 1920s. Schrödinger is the one who perfected quantum mechanics so it could be used. And he discovered in his mathematical assessment of quantum mechanics that elementary particles, when they get born together, little twin particles, they’re entangled with one another. So even though these little photons traveling away from each other at the speed of light, when you grab one of the twins, you affect the other one. And Einstein found that shocking and he famously said that’s a spooky connection at a distance and he didn’t like that. But this kind of connection was shown to be true in the 1970s at UC Berkeley and then proved to be true in experiments that were done in Switzerland, where in Switzerland Nicolas Gisin was using lasers in Geneva and he would send a laser beam to the left and a laser beam to the right so that when a guy in Basel would turn his polarizer, the guy in Zurich would see something happen. And physicists hate that. If I’m sitting at my laser table, my optical bench, I want to feel that the experiment’s under my control here. And I don’t want to have to worry that Alan in New York has another laser that he’s working with and when Alan sneezes, my interference regions will go away. Physicists would hate that to happen.
Alan Steinfeld
So you’re saying that that’s actually been shown to happen, that they…
Russell Targ
That is true. That’s called a… what John Stewart Bell in 1960 called a non-local connection. He said it’s impossible that we live in a local world. Things are connected even though that they appear separate from one another. And that’s the hot news in modern physics. If you look on the internet for non-locality, you would find thousands of papers printed. Now, if you look on the internet for remote viewing, you’ll now find more than two million pages. So remote viewing is still ahead of non-locality. But non-locality…
Alan Steinfeld
Do you feel proud that you’re one of the fathers of that, those two million pages? Is that kind of a good feeling for you?
Russell Targ
Well, I’ll be happy when it’s more accepted. That is, we’re still struggling. See, I have… Alan, the thing is, I’m a Buddhist and one of the Buddhist tenets that’s very important for me, the tenet that says, ‘Don’t expect applause.’ Okay. So we’ve done a lot of work, many, many people are teaching remote viewing, and there’s now a confluence of agreement between ESP researchers and physicists, because both of us are describing the fact that we live in a non-local space time. Now, what the physicist says is that the nature of our universe, independent of ESP, independent of any experiment, the nature of the universe is that separation is an illusion. It’s non-local. As a consequence of that, certain interesting optics experiments will allow a guy in New York to turn a polarizer and cause my fringes in California to go away. And that’s non-locality in optics. The other thing we can do is I can be sitting here with you and say, I have an interesting object hidden away. Can you quiet your mind, expand your awareness, and experience yourself as non-local awareness, and describe my object? And if you feel relaxed and trusting, you can go into that non-local space time with your awareness and describe my object. And that’s non-locality just like the non-locality with the optics experiment.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay. Now I have a few questions because this is where I think our field of human potential, or whatever you want to call it, gets a bad name or a strange name because you’re talking about physics, Schrödinger’s physics, and then how does consciousness, whatever that is, connect to the physical world? Yes, consciousness is local, but you have to then define consciousness or awareness. And that is separate from a quantum physics or a physics term. So as a physicist, how do you define consciousness in a physical, in a physics framework? Do you know what I mean?
Russell Targ
Well, I would describe our consciousness. I would say that who you are is not just the knish you had for dinner. There’s really more to you than that knish. And what I would say is that who you are is non-local awareness. You’re residing as a body, but bodies come and go. But your awareness is eternal. The evidence that personality survives death is very good. The evidence for that’s very strong. And the evidence that who you are is non-local awareness, we can now demonstrate that. We become very skillful at showing people how to get in touch with their non-local awareness. Now this is not new, as you realize. The Buddhists at the time of Christ wrote in the Prajnaparamita in the Buddhist writings that separation is an illusion. There’s no distance between consciousness and the rest of the physical universe. And this was first written in the Hindu Vedas, 4,000 years ago, 2,000 years before Christ. And the idea that Atman equal Brahman. Atman is your self or your soul and Brahman is the all the physical and non-physical space time. So the Yin Yang symbol that we, that’s so common even today, 4,000 years later says that your awareness is in all of the space time. That is, your awareness is not localized into your own physical body. Your awareness can be found in all the physical and non-physical space time. And this was of course experiential. Meditators who quiet their mind have an opportunity to experience this. And in my book, In Reality of Mind, I have a whole chapter devoted to the Buddhist teaching on the fact that we can look into the distance, look into the future, heal the sick, diagnose illnesses, talk to the dead, remember past lives, so forth. That was all written about in great detail 2,000 years ago. It was just part of experience. There’s obviously no theory of non-local space time then. But they just knew from meditation that when you quiet your mind, you begin to experience your non-local awareness.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, but how do you talk to physicists, as a physicist, about consciousness? Because they’re really concerned with physics, the physicality of things, and you are talking about the non-physical. Yes, they may say something is non-local because they’ve seen rotations of electrons do simultaneous spins or whatever. But how do you get them open to this idea of consciousness? This is the big bridge that needs to be crossed. And I’m on both sides, but how do you join the two?
Russell Targ
Well, I say first of all, consciousness must be physical because it’s efficacious. That is, I can, if I’m a healer, I can quiet my mind in California and make your pain go away. So I can do something here with a quiet mind and non-local awareness that will have an effect. That if you’re sitting there with a strain gauge on your body, for example, let’s say you’re in pain, and I quiet my mind, I can make your pain go away and the stress would go down as shown on the meter. My daughter did experiments with her, Elizabeth was a psychiatrist and did experiments with her AIDS patients in San Francisco, and she had healers all over the country send healing energy or good wishes to her men who were very sick. And the half of them who received the prayers, there was a control group and a prayed for group, the prayed for group had much better outcomes than the controls. So she found, after she broke the double blind, that the people who received the prayers had fewer opportunistic illnesses, fewer trips to the hospital, much better psychological state of mind. And nobody knew who was being prayed for. It was a perfect double blind experiment published in the Western Medical Journal. And now there have been other replications by with NIH funding. But what it says is that a energy healer in Long Island, Barbara Brennan’s energy healers in Long Island can look at a picture of a sick man in California and affect his blood count.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, how…
Russell Targ
That’s what you mean. That’s what you mean by saying that consciousness is physical. Her, the thoughts of the woman in Long Island are have agency. That is, they have an effect on something you can measure in another place. So it must be physical in some sort in order to have an effect on another physical system.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. It makes sense to me because I already know that I’m a non-local being living in the illusion of materiality. I mean, I do have a sense of that that the physical world we call physical is just a fabrication of a conditioned mental model that we think is real. I mean, I’ve meditated enough to be aware of something. But I was wondering what physicists would say to you, hardcore physicists, who are maybe open to this but they haven’t made that bridge in their thinking. Yes, what you just said is one way, but what would they say from the other side of the fence?
Russell Targ
I would say that the evidence is overwhelming. I would give them evidence from our experiments and say that the police in Berkeley once called us when Patricia Hearst was kidnapped. Patricia Hearst was the daughter of William Randolph Hearst, the editor of the San Francisco Examiner. And Patricia Hearst was the heiress of the wealthiest family in San Francisco, and she was kidnapped by something called the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. It was big news. I think it was like ’77. I remember it was huge. So they called the Stanford Research Institute and the remote viewing unit there with you guys?
Russell Targ
Yes. And we then drove to Berkeley, Hal Puthoff and my colleague and Pat Price was a great psychic retired police commissioner and psychic. And we walked into the detective’s office at Berkeley Police Headquarters, and they said, ‘We have some questions we want to ask you.’ And Price, the police commissioner, basically said, ‘Nuts to you,’ in other words, he said, ‘I want to see your mugbook. I want to see the picture book of all the usual suspects.’ And they laid this big loose leaf binder on the table, and he stood up and turned the pages, and turned the pages. They’re four pictures, four mugshots to a page. Then he got to a page and he put his finger on one guy. He said, ‘That’s the ring leader. That’s the ring leader.’ And the name is Donald DeFreeze. ‘And he’s the ring leader.’ And the detective said, ‘Well, we know that guy. He was arrested a couple of years ago. And then he walked away from his minimum security prison and we haven’t seen him since.’ And Price said, ‘Well, you’ll find out pretty soon that he’s the ring leader.’ And the police said, ‘Well, that’s very interesting. Can you tell us anything we can verify right now?’ And Price said, ‘Well, how would it be if I told you where the kidnap car is right now?’ And Price said that ‘I see a white station wagon about 50 miles north of where we were in Berkeley. And the station wagon is parked next to a diner across the street from two white gas cylinders, big gas cylinders. And there’s a pedestrian overpass across the freeway.’ And when the detective said, ‘I know where that is, that’s up by Vallejo where I drive on my way home.’ And they dispatched a cruiser. And within 10 minutes, they found the white station wagon, and there were still cartridges rolling around on the floor that were a match for the cartridges we saw earlier in the day on the floor of Patricia Hearst’s apartment. So we knew right then for a fact that the psychic policeman in Berkeley had found the kidnapped car in Vallejo 50 miles away just by closing his eyes and wishing to find the kidnapped car.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, couldn’t he have found the kidnapped, the Patty Hearst herself? I mean…
Russell Targ
Well, they were no longer in the car. That is, they had moved away. They’d gone to San Francisco. The problem was that the Berkeley Police Department and the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department and the FBI were not cooperating at all. Each of these police entities wanted the privilege of finding the heiress and bringing her home. So there was no cooperation and the kidnappers, I should say three days later Donald DeFreeze was indeed, he came forward with a ransom request, a request for money to feed the poor in San Francisco. So within three days we knew that Donald DeFreeze was correctly identified by Price. So that’s one of the most miraculous things that I’ve ever seen is where a person is able to stand and name a distant person and then tell where the car is.
Alan Steinfeld
Now let’s talk about how we think he would have done that. I mean, of course in theory, like the theory you laid out everything is non-local, but how did he specifically do that? I mean did he see a picture in his mind? And what facility did Pat Price particularly have that made him that kind of excellent remote viewer?
Russell Targ
Years of practice and he was talented.
Alan Steinfeld
Practicing what?
Russell Targ
He was a natural psychic from childhood. He and Ingo Swann were natural psychics.
Alan Steinfeld
When you say natural psychics, they would see images all the time? They would just tune into someone?
Russell Targ
They could quiet their mind. Seeing images all the time makes you crazy. As Peter Hurkos saw images all the time and he’d quench that with alcohol because he wasn’t able to separate the psychic signal from the mental noise, he’d just have psychic images going through his head all the time and that’s not good because that interferes with your ordinary life.
Alan Steinfeld
Right.
Russell Targ
Now what the Buddhists and the Hindus say is that psychic abilities are very useful and they indicate that you’re making progress on your spiritual path, but if you get attached to them, then it becomes a stumbling block. As anything you get attached to becomes a stumbling block. They said these abilities will be useful to you, just don’t get too involved in this.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. So Pat was naturally able to quiet his mind, and of course if we all do that, we’ll all start to tap in. But then these things come or these images, and it came to me when we did that little demonstration on YouTube, but there’s like images that come, and the key thing that you said to me, that you just said now is to separate the noise, which is what our mind would expect it to be, from the signal.
Russell Targ
Memory and imagination and analysis is the noise.
Alan Steinfeld
Yes.
Russell Targ
So you see I kept saying to you that I have an object that’s very unusual. Don’t try and name it. Don’t try and guess what it is. Don’t do analysis. What I always say to people is just quiet your mind and describe the surprising image that comes into your awareness.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. That’s the key point that I’m trying to get at. The surprising image that comes into our mind. It’s like a signal from outside of us is suddenly received and we get something we hadn’t expected before.
Russell Targ
That’s right. It’s probably not only outside of you, it’s probably outside of space-time.
Alan Steinfeld
Yes.
Russell Targ
Because you’re connected to things that are in the distance or in the future. And really the most important thing that I can tell you about all this is that it’s no harder to describe something thousands of miles away than it is to describe the object in my pocket. You can describe the Soviet weapons facility in Semipalatinsk that is 6,000 miles away just as accurately as you could describe the funny object in my pocket.
Alan Steinfeld
And would you say just as accurately as I can describe something a thousand years in the future, or does something shift over time?
Russell Targ
We don’t know a thousand years in the future, but we know a few days in the future.
Alan Steinfeld
Tell us about what you did with the silver trades.
Russell Targ
That is, by non-local what we mean is that there’s no degradation of accuracy or reliability to describe something in the near future as it is to describe something contemporaneously. So to demonstrate that, we set up a program to describe changes in the silver commodity market. So it would be nice if you could read the numbers up on the big board on Wall Street.
Alan Steinfeld
And be able to get your money, yeah.
Russell Targ
But you’re not able to read. Reading is an analytical task and psychics can’t do analysis. So we would do something called associative remote viewing, where you describe the object that I’m going to hand you at the end of the week. The way this would work is my broker in Montgomery Street each week would choose four interesting different objects and then label them up a little, up a lot, down a little, down a lot. And at the end of the week, he would hand me or hand the psychic one of those objects depending on what silver did. So on Monday, I would interview my psychic and say, “Hi Keith, I’m going to hand you something interesting Friday. Can you tell me what I’m going to hand you?” I of course have no idea what it is because the broker chose them and didn’t tell me, and the stock market is going to choose the one object that I’ll hand you. So it’s like triple blind. I don’t know the objects and the broker doesn’t know which one he’s going to hand me until Friday shows it.
Alan Steinfeld
So the going up stock is associated with one image. A going down stock is associated with another image. Is that what you’re saying?
Russell Targ
That’s right. Up a little, up a lot, down a little, down a lot.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay, how are those associations picked with the image and the up and down?
Russell Targ
He just did it arbitrarily.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay.
Russell Targ
So let’s say I’m sitting with my psychic on Monday morning and I say, “Quiet your mind and tell me about the surprising thing I will put in your hand next Friday.” The psychic will say to me, “Well, I see something round and floppy, this is kind of a disgusting object, and it has a funny smell.” So he’s giving me this round floppy thing that smells bad and I can draw that for you, but I have no idea what that could be and I don’t much like it. So I would say that’s a terrific description, I really like that because he’s made contact with it, he’s done what Ingo Swann would call an aesthetic contact, that he got the feeling of it and the smell of it. And I would then call my broker and say, “I got a very interesting description, what are your four objects today?” And he’d say, “Well, the up a lot object is a champagne bottle, empty of course, and the up a little object is a Dixie cup, the down a little object is a book, and the down a lot object is my leftover pancake from breakfast, it’s still on my desk.” And I would say, “John, it sounds to me like we’ve just described your leftover pancake.” And I’d then get tell him the description. He’d say, “Well, that’s a terrific description.” So based on my psychic’s description of the leftover pancake, we would put $30,000 in the silver market to sell silver short.
Alan Steinfeld
And how did you do overall? Were you 100% or how long?
Russell Targ
We were 100% over nine weeks. We did that nine times in a row and were correct every week and made $120,000, which was a lot of money in 1985.
Alan Steinfeld
It’s still a lot of money, and why did you stop doing it?
Russell Targ
Well, our plan was to do that nine times in a row, and then we stopped because we didn’t want to wear people out.
Alan Steinfeld
Oh, okay. And it gets a little boring I guess, you know, there’s better things to do.
Russell Targ
Yeah. And then I repeated that 10 years later working with a spiritual healer, where she and I were the psychics, and we went we got 11 out of 12 correct. So even scientists can be psychic if they put their minds to it and do it carefully.
Alan Steinfeld
But it’s interesting you say that the near future is predictable but the distant future is not, or it seems not. Why would you say that is? What goes on?
Russell Targ
Well, we haven’t done experiments in the distant future. Because one of the things that drives these experiments is the feedback you get. See, I’m telling the viewer that at the end of a week, I’m going to put something interesting in your hand. So you’re sitting here on Monday looking forward to Friday what I’m putting in the hand. So you have to quiet your mind and describe what’s going to happen at a later time. And then five days in the future ideally you will remember what it felt like when you were describing the object. So if you go a year in the future you won’t even remember the experiment.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. But then let’s talk about this thing you mentioned.
Russell Targ
So what drives this is the feedback. See, I’m not asking you to describe what silver is doing, I’m asking you to focus on what I’m going to put in your hand five days in the future.
Alan Steinfeld
I get that and that’s how you can verify. So perhaps we could remote view 20 or 100 years in the future, but we would never really know what was possible. But in your book you do talk about the future can affect the past and you say it can’t change it. You talk about that amazing story about the Wreck of the Titan, an 1898 similar ship to the Titanic in 1912. So tell us about that, what’s happening in that example? Flesh it out a little bit.
Russell Targ
Well, that’s Morgan Robertson, he’s an American writer and theosophist, short story writer, and he was sitting in his Washington Heights apartment in New York in December of 1898.
Alan Steinfeld
1898. He was sitting in his apartment in New York.
Russell Targ
Right, sitting by the fire because it was cold. And he began to think of a short story. He quieted his mind and he got the idea to write a short story about a ship, the biggest ship that was ever built, and he thought of an 800-foot ship that was more than twice as big as any ocean-going liner at the time, with four smokestacks and three propellers. And he had the idea that it would have waterproof compartments. He said it would have 22 waterproof compartments, where it turned out the Titanic had 24. And he said let’s call this ship the Titan.
Alan Steinfeld
Right.
Russell Targ
And he said this ship is crossing the Atlantic on a moonless night in the middle of April, and it’s going at 25 miles an hour across the ocean, much faster than it should be going because it wanted to reduce the time it takes to get from America to London, and it ran into an iceberg. And because it had too few lifeboats, he said it’s going to have only half the lifeboats that it should have because they wanted to have the space on the upper deck available for dancing, and because the ship is unsinkable, you don’t really need lifeboats.
Alan Steinfeld
That gives me chills just to hear that.
Russell Targ
So he wrote that in 1898, and 14 years later, every piece of that came to pass when the Titanic… See he even had the name right, he called it Wreck of the Titan, and the ship that crashed of course was the Titanic, on a moonless night in April it ran into an iceberg exactly as he had written.
Alan Steinfeld
Now was it a popular story at the time or was it an obscure story, The Wreck of the Titan?
Russell Targ
It was in a New York magazine like Collier’s or one of those magazines. I don’t recall. So a New York, it was an American magazine that published like Atlantic or Harper’s Bazaar or Collier’s or Liberty. There are lots of magazines at that time.
Alan Steinfeld
So the big question is, did he remote view the future or did he in a sense actually cause the future by putting it out there like that? I mean, that’s the question I have about that.
Russell Targ
Now I’m sure he didn’t cause the future, because nobody would ever read a story about a ship that crashed killing all the people on board and say, “What a good idea, let’s build one just like that.”
Alan Steinfeld
No, I’m not saying on purpose, but I’m saying something in the energy may have been picked up in the field that fulfilled this vision, but I’m not saying it was on purpose. I’m just saying…
Russell Targ
The evidence is against that. Although there is something like psychokinesis as we know, the effect size or the power of psychokinesis is less than a tenth as great as the power of remote viewing. Remote viewing is your ability to look into the future and look into the distance. Psychokinesis is your power to affect things. Now if you do experiments, for example, let’s say I give you a metal box. I have we did experiments with Uri Geller and I got the metal box right in front of me on my table here. It’s an old-fashioned file box for 3×5 file cards, if you can remember such a thing. And you put a die in the metal file box and then I shake the hell out of that die and say, “Okay, Uri, what face is uppermost when you look at it?” And we did that 10 times in a row and he got all 10 of them correct. Now that’s a hugely significant experiment. It’s an amazing experiment that he could tell each time which face would be uppermost. But if I said, “Let’s shake this and I want you to create a number six uppermost each time,” that experiment works very poorly. That works a little bit. That is you expect only one out of six correct, but you might get two out of ten. So if you did that thousands of times, you would say, “What do you know, he really can control the way the die comes up.” But his ability to control a six is not nearly as good as his ability to foretell it.
Alan Steinfeld
So is there a script that is already written for the future? I mean we’re being philosophical, but is there a determinate trajectory of time and we could either view it or not? I mean, or is there free choice every second? I mean, it seems like you’re saying that there isn’t in a sense free will, things occur as they occur and we could choose to view that or not. Are you saying that?
Russell Targ
I’m basically saying that things are pretty much determined. Now a human being has a little residual free will depending on how able he is to get off the ordinary material space-time plane where we live. See, if you have access to your non-local consciousness, then you can peek into the future and if you don’t like the future, you don’t have to experience that. But by and large, people just creep along at one second per second attending to the thing right in front of them. And the way people most often have access to the future is in precognitive dreams. Precognitive dreams are the way that most people first notice that they live in a psychic world. So we had a contract monitor from the CIA who worked with us for many years and then was off in Detroit doing something different, other business. And he had an unusually frightening dream of being in a fireball of an airplane crash. Now this is not a scaredy cat, he’s been in thousands of airplanes, no fear of flying. But this dream was so realistic and he had seen a lot of psychic stuff in which we forecast the future, we even forecast a Chinese atomic bomb test for him. So when he had this frightening dream, he has a wife and a nice little girl back in Washington, he said, “You know, I think I’m going to change my plans.” So he told his partner that something came up. Of course, he didn’t want to appear to be a sissy, so he didn’t tell his partner that he had a scary dream. He just said something has come up. And in the CIA you learn not to ask too many questions. He said, “But I’ll drive you to the airport.” So he drove his friend to the airport and put him on the airplane this summer evening. And by the time he had gotten to the frontage road, he heard this big explosion and saw a fireball. So he got to experience the airplane crash.
Alan Steinfeld
Why didn’t he tell his friend that, hey… well whatever.
Russell Targ
Because he didn’t want to appear to be a scaredy cat.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. Anyway, I hope all that’s changing where people can start to reveal…
Russell Targ
So everybody was killed except for one little girl. And in my book, The Reality of ESP, I talk about how this airplane crash was easy to forecast because it was so psychically, so karmically determined. The Buddhists believe in karma where things are in fact caused by deterministic forces or past life forces. But in my next job after SRI doing ESP, I was involved in airplane safety, putting lasers on airplanes to avoid crashes due to wind shear. So I had a chance to read about this crash. And they moved this DC-10 from a long runway to a short runway. And it was a very hot night, so there’s less aerodynamic lift, and the airplane was full of passengers. And there turned out to be wind shear at the end of the runway, which is why I was involved. And the main thing was the pilot was trying to make a date with a stewardess for what they were going to do during the layover between that night’s flight and the next day’s flight. So a pilot had disabled the annoying buzzer that told him that he was taxiing with no flaps, no ailerons extended. So you had five different things all contributing to this crash. This crash was strongly determined.
Alan Steinfeld
So and that’s why the psychic would pick that up.
Russell Targ
That’s right. So that’s the best case that I know of where somebody actually had a clear dream. Now what I would say is that he dreamt of a fireball, which is what he saw. And then in the course of dramatizing it, he put himself in that fireball because he knew he was flying. But he did not have to experience the fireball.
Alan Steinfeld
But in the case of the Wreck of the Titan, which, you know, was a if you believe what you’re saying, I do. It was a…
Russell Targ
In the case of the Wreck of the Titan, there’s no question of belief. I’ve got the book on my table.
Alan Steinfeld
You got the Wreck of the Titan on your table? 1898.
Russell Targ
That is it. It was republished. There’s a Titanic fan club in Massachusetts that has all sorts of memorabilia from the Titanic. And they published this book comprising the Wreck of the Titan and many people’s reminiscences about the author, about Morgan Robertson. And people who knew him described the things he was interested in and what he did. So this book is a kind of reminiscence of the whole Wreck of the Titan, what actually occurred, and what he said occurred. And I tell that whole story in The Reality of ESP.
Alan Steinfeld
And so what was his reaction when the Titanic actually sunk in 1912? What did he have to…
Russell Targ
We don’t know that. The good news is that he did live to see that. So he actually got to see the famous picture of the Titanic on the New York Times with its four smokestacks, and the thing Titanic destroyed. So that one source of information for him is to look into the future and see this stupendous event 10 years in the future that he actually got to experience.
Alan Steinfeld
What did he say? Was he freaked out? What did he have to…
Russell Targ
We don’t know that.
Alan Steinfeld
Oh, you don’t know what his comment, his reaction to that was.
Russell Targ
We know that he and his magazine reprinted the story, tabulating the fact that he had the length correct, and the speed correct, and the horsepower correct, tabulating all those things because that’s now on the internet. If you look up Titanic forecast, there are many places that have compared what he said with what happened.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, I mean there’s a couple of things that you also talk about, remote viewing the future. How somebody would be dispatched from the SRI center and not know where they’re going. And someone like Ingo Swann would say they’re going to be at this spot at three o’clock in the afternoon and they didn’t even know where they were going to be and yet they end up there. Now is that along the same pre-determinant lines that in a way we don’t have a choice? Except in some cases about what we’re doing moment to moment even?
Russell Targ
Well, what I would say is that I did those experiments with Hella Hammid, a photographer who was brought in as a control subject. She had never done this before. So each day at 10 o’clock Hal Puthoff would take a stack of envelopes and a random number generator and go out for a drive for half an hour. And then from 10 to 10:30 I would interview Hella about where we would go at noon. What does it look like where I’m going to take you at 12 o’clock? Half hour later, Hal would operate his random number generator which gave him a number. He would look through his stack of envelopes, pull out that envelope, and go to whatever traveling orders he had. Let’s say he went to the garden behind the hospital in Palo Alto. And he would walk around there for half an hour and then come home. Then at 11:30, he and I and Hella would go to the place. So then we had this little science fiction experience. We’d play Hella’s tape. I see Hal walking around in a manicured garden. There are tall columns here, it’s a colonnade. Behind the colonnade are these very unusual trees, all well manicured, cut into interesting shapes. It’s somebody’s private garden. And that’s where we were. We were in a little manicured garden of the Stanford hospital surrounded by columns, and the colonnade that make up the front of the hospital. So that had a very twilight zone aspect to it because I knew for a fact that she had said those words two hours before. And I knew for a fact that Hal used a true random number generator to decide where to go. The question is how did Hella know where he was going to go? And the answer that we would give is that she looked into her future. At 12 o’clock she will in fact be some place and she is able to look along the timeline outside space and time. It sort of finessed the random number generator here. You’re looking outside space and time in a non-local space time that we write about. We have a model for how that works. To answer your earlier question, yes, there is a physical model for non-local space time that physicists are interested in. A complex space time, non-local space time. So she could look there and see what’s going to happen, describe that, and then two hours later we’d find ourselves there. And we published that in our paper in the IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and she got all of them correct.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, that’s just…
Russell Targ
So that’s why we say the surprising thing that is no harder to describe a future occurrence than it is to describe a hidden occurrence that’s contemporaneous.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, I interviewed this guy named David Lewis Anderson, who says he has a time warp generator, which means he could go actually back in time or he says he’s actually sent plants back in time. And he did the grandfather experiment where he sent some plants back in time and then in the present time, he killed the grandparents of the plants he sent back. So in effect, those plants should not exist. But he said when they came back, they did exist, but they had a different DNA signature, meaning that they weren’t related to the plants that were killed. So there was like, what I hypothesized or what maybe he suggested, there’s a parallel timeframe that gets developed alongside our timeframe. So there’s… I mean this is a little out there, but there’s like parallel running timelines and…
Russell Targ
Well, for me it’s a lot out there. That is, I suddenly become very hard-nosed and say, well, that’s very interesting. And where did he publish that?
Alan Steinfeld
Well, he says he’s working… Well, I’ll send you the interview…
Russell Targ
And I know, I mean he’s got a time machine and nothing’s published and nothing’s to be seen. I think there’s a lot to be excited about, but I respectfully suggest you be excited about the things that are actually published and can be demonstrated.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, I’m interested because he says he works for some government agencies where he can’t like DARPA or DOD or something like that. He says he works for… and he really can’t come out publicly with these…
Russell Targ
I would bet against it. I don’t believe that you can affect the present by changing the past. I think it’s a logical contradiction. You can’t change something that’s already occurred. It doesn’t make logical sense.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, I mean it’s sort of like the universe bifurcates and there was like one thing where that had occurred in that reality but then you create… sounds like science fiction to you in a way that…
Russell Targ
It sounds like science fiction. That is, I’m enough involved in science fiction so that I’m excited about things that we can actually show people how to do. That is, I can teach people how to separate the psychic signal from their mental noise so they can improve their psychic abilities. You learn to control your mind so that you’re no longer doing analysis or involved with memory and imagination and naming. Even the problem with naming is that objects don’t actually have names. Names are just applied to objects. The Buddhists knew all this in the eighth century. The Buddhists talked about emptiness. And I consider the Buddhist discovery of the idea of emptiness to be their most important discovery. Namely, that in the universe things don’t have names. We ascribe names to them. We ascribe meaning to them. So if you want to experience the world as it really exists, you have to move from your conditioned awareness where everything has a name and your ego’s involved in naming and you can move to naked awareness where things are experienced as they really are with no names. But in order to describe something with no names, you simply have to describe your experience of the thing as it appears in your awareness without naming it. So that’s the skill in remote viewing. You have to surrender your desire to name things. So if I am telling you that I went to an interesting place this afternoon. Can you describe where I went? And you say, well, it looks to me like Macy’s. I would say no, Ellen, don’t name the place. I want you to simply describe what you saw.
Alan Steinfeld
That’s where a lot of psychics mess up because they start to put a name on things that…
Russell Targ
That’s right.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah. No, I agree. But just getting back to the other example, doesn’t Dean Radin talk about retrocausality where the present can affect the past in some cases?
Russell Targ
It can affect the past but it can’t change the past.
Alan Steinfeld
What’s the difference between changing it and affecting it? I mean, wouldn’t it…
Russell Targ
It’s a big difference. If you have a precognitive dream that an airplane is going to crash and you decide not to take the airplane, then you avoid being in the airplane crash for which you have a ticket. In fact, on 9/11 I was in Italy. I psychically left New York on 9/10, so I was out of the country on 9/11. I picked up the Herald Tribune on 9/12 and read that article and I immediately noticed that there were less than half as many people on the four airplanes than there should have been. As a Monday morning commute airplane the load factor is usually 60 and on this day the load factor was 30. That is, there were half as many people on the planes as you would expect. So for some reason, and I haven’t investigated, airplanes don’t like to give you this data. For some reason, lots of people either canceled their flights or just didn’t show up on the flights that were going to be kidnapped. And there’s no doubt about that. The data are published. So that’s called affecting the past. That is, a future event, the airplane caused you at an earlier time to have a dream and based on that dream you didn’t get on the airplane. So the future is affecting your behavior at an earlier time. You got it? The plane crashed at eight o’clock in the morning, and that eight o’clock crash caused you to change your behavior two hours earlier. Now if you were on the airplane and died, no further event, no dream that I had could make you have not died. So once a thing has happened… So we say you can affect the past, I can save you getting on the airplane. But if you insist on getting on the airplane and crash, I can’t help you anymore.
Alan Steinfeld
Unless you believe in parallel dimensions and parallel lines and all that stuff. But we will never know about that. But I’m just putting out a little…
Russell Targ
I’m especially not interested in things that we can never know about.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay. But what about, what do you think about Roger Nelson’s experiments at Princeton where he measures and it’s sort of what you were just saying, the collective awareness of the population through random number generators that start to pick up a signal from the collective that affects its randomness? Do you know what I mean?
Russell Targ
Well, there is some evidence that when there is a catastrophic world event, then there’s evidence that when there’s a catastrophic world event that the result of that is that his 60 random number generators become a little more coherent. That’s the data, that’s what it looks like. For example, when they had five random number generators occurring being observed, and it was the day that OJ Simpson’s verdict was going to be read. And as they tore open the envelope at exactly nine o’clock and said the guy is not guilty, all the random number generators had a huge coherent blip together. As a whole world was shocked at this decision of the jury. And that’s a published result.
Alan Steinfeld
He also says that there was a precognitive factor in the World Trade Center that four hours before those planes hit the building there was already a non-randomness or…
Russell Targ
Now from a scientist, that’s a big problem. Because if somebody says I have an effect where my random number generator is going to respond to a worldwide cataclysmic effect, but I’m not going to tell you when it occurs. It may occur earlier, it may occur later, it may occur at the same time. Then you suddenly have a lot of space to look through your data which is really quite noisy. So if you don’t specify in advance when this event is going to occur, then you can do what we call data snooping. That is, you now know that the event occurred at eight o’clock and you don’t see something that occurred at eight o’clock which is what you’d like. But you say well at 5:30, two and a half hours before the airplanes crashed, I get a big blip in my data. That’s a precognitive indication. But experimental science doesn’t let you do that after the fact. If you’re doing an experiment showing a change in random noise, then you’ve got to tell me what kind of change you’re looking for and when it’s going to occur. If you have infinite flexibility that says oh look the noise stopped an hour after it occurred or the noise stopped an hour before it occurred. By looking at a tremendous amount of noise, you can always find a wiggle that occurs someplace. So I’m somewhat critical about data snooping where you just look through the noise and found a blip and said that’s it. And scientifically that’s not a good way to do it.
Alan Steinfeld
Well let’s just stay with the OJ Simpson case where collectively there seems like there’s a collective psychic or ESP phenomena that even the people, having 30% less people on the plane than usual on 9/11. There seems like there is a collective of humanity that tunes into something. It’s not just individually. I mean, of course, it’s made up…
Russell Targ
The Buddhist says getting to the end, the separation of consciousness is an illusion. Many bodies, one consciousness. And Schrödinger said that also in the 1930s. The idea of many consciousnesses is an illusion like walking through a hall of mirrors. There is, in fact, consciousness as a singular of which there is no plural. We each have our own experience, but there is only one consciousness.
Alan Steinfeld
Let’s also…
Russell Targ
It’s getting to be a good time to wind up. If you want to learn how to do this, I gave a whole chapter in my new book, The Reality of ESP, describing how to find a friend, how to find a partner, and practice remote viewing. And my experience is that it’s very easy to learn. And if you want to see some evidence, you can go to my website, which is espresearch.com.
Alan Steinfeld
People can order the book on Amazon as well, is that right?
Russell Targ
Yes, indeed.
Alan Steinfeld
Just one question I want to ask. In Chapter 9, you talk about evidence that something survives bodily death. Can you just give a brief overview of that?
Russell Targ
People have been looking at that now for 100 years. That is ESP got its start with survival research at Cambridge University. I got interested in that because of two cases where I had some contact. One of them was the grandmother of a… let me get this right. The mother of a laser colleague of mine in Boulder, a very nice woman, head of the League of Women Voters, asked me if I believed in ghosts. I said, “Well, possibly.” She said, “Let me tell you a ghost story.” She had gone with my friend’s daughter, a five-year-old. Grandma takes a five-year-old on a nature walk in the Ozark wilderness area. They go for a walk with grandma, little girl, Hillary, and two other people. Hillary slips away, and within a moment, they can’t find her. It’s the top of a canyon, with a waterfall and a river. It’s like a smaller Grand Canyon, very dangerous Ozark wilderness. They can’t find the kid. Grandma runs home, calls the police. They get dogs and helicopters, and they can’t find the child. That’s the end of the first day. My friend is furious. He said, “Ma, what have you done with my little girl? How could you lose a five-year-old?” The next day, Grandma goes to the dowser, the famous dowser in Fairbanks, Arizona, where there is a dowser’s congress. The dowser, whose name I’ve forgotten, the famous dowser said, “Don’t worry, she’s being taken care of by a woman, and she’ll be found the next day by two men on horseback.” So you have a full additional day now with helicopters, search teams prowling over the canyon, no child. The third day, two men on muleback walking along the river at the base of the canyon, find the little girl lying on a boulder, quite dehydrated, exhausted. They take her to the hospital. She’s not injured. She said, “Oh, I was really in no danger. A little girl took care of me. She had a flashlight, and she knew her way around. Her name was Alicia. Alicia was very helpful, but she’s gone now.” The little girl drew a picture of her new friend Alicia, and her mother seemed to remember, Grandma seemed to remember, that a little girl had been killed in that canyon about 10 years before. She did research and found the mother of the little girl who was killed, and the child’s name was Alicia. She did have a flashlight that she was attached to. The picture that little Hillary drew showing this girl with bell-bottoms, a tie-dyed shirt, and dark braids greatly resembled the murdered girl. To put it all in one sentence, it looked very much like this dead girl had come along to help Hillary get from the top of the canyon to the bottom of the canyon without getting killed, as though she was looking for a playmate. Because it’s as though the observer will have to deal with, is this little five-year-old somehow in her flip-flops and a t-shirt, cold in the night, got from the top of the Grand Canyon to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The question is, how the hell did she do that? A local nature guide, a tracker, wrote a book called The Case of Hillary, and he wasn’t interested in the ghost story aspect. He led walking tours through the canyon, and his investigation is how would it be possible in principle for a little child to get from the top of the canyon to the bottom. So this was worth an investigation because it was like an impossible occurrence. Grandma did enough research so that she had a spontaneous drawing by her granddaughter, and the granddaughter had the name of the person right, and nobody knew this. Grandma didn’t know the name of the little girl, and the little girl didn’t know anything about it at all. This all was in Arizona, and the girl was from Colorado. From my point of view, it looks very much like there was a surviving spirit of this girl who was murdered in the canyon.
Alan Steinfeld
To make a believer out of me.
Russell Targ
No, I believe it. Let’s wrap it up. If we can fit it into a big picture, we have this remote viewing, this non-local aspect of consciousness. Outside of space and time. Where does Alicia, the little dead girl, live? Where is she? How does that affect everything that we essentially are? The illusion that we are, and the reality of who we really are as beings beyond time and space. How do we take that awareness to rebuild a new culture based on consciousness? What’s your vision of that future?
Russell Targ
We have access to this nonlocal universe outside of space and time. It’s not a magical space. Minkowski knew all about this at the time of Einstein. The fact that there was a complex space-time. I described that in my book at all. It’s outside of ordinary physical space-time. But it’s a real place. It’s where spirits can reside and where you find a shortcut to look into the distance and into the future. It’s a non-local space-time.
Alan Steinfeld
But it’s also where we reside. As the Buddhists would say ultimately, the illusion of the personality. It seems like that is who we are. The being that lives in that non-local outside of space-time dimension.
Russell Targ
That’s correct. We’re residents of nonlocal space-time. As you sit on the cushion and quiet your mind, you can learn to go there. If you don’t want to suffer, you want to move from conditioned awareness, where you are concerned with your ego and the story of who you are, you can do that and suffer all the slings and arrows attacking your ego. Or you can move into the more spacious realms.
Alan Steinfeld
Thank you, Russell. Another beautiful book, another in-depth research. I’ve been talking to Russell Targ.
Russell Targ
Send people to my website, which is espresearch.com for more information.
Alan Steinfeld
The book is The Reality of ESP, A Physicist’s Proof of Psychic Abilities, published by Quest this year 2012. I recommend it and a lot of other books that you’ve written over the years. The last one we talked about was Do You See What I See?
Russell Targ
Which was Memoirs of a Blind Biker.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. Well, good luck. What’s coming up for you? Anything?
Russell Targ
I’m teaching with Deepak Chopra, and I’m enjoying doing that. I’ll come to New York in August and hope to visit with you then.
Alan Steinfeld
Thank you, Russell. Thanks for being a guest. Thanks for your time. This is Alan Steinfeld for New Realities. I’ve been talking to Russell Targ. I have a great remote viewing interview I did with him about that work, and you can see that on YouTube. On my site as well, newrealities.com. On Russell’s site, the espresearch.com site. On youtube.com/newrealities. It’s a great example of how Russell Targ guided me in an on-the-air remote viewing right there in five minutes. This book looks really exciting. The Reality of ESP, A Physicist’s Proof of Psychic Abilities by Russell Targ. If you have any other questions, you can email me at newrealities@earthlink.net. You can check my website newrealities.com. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week. Thanks.