Limitless M I N D OTHER BOOKS BY RUSSELL TARG The Heart of the Mind: How to Experience God without Belief (1999; with Jane Katra) Miracles of Mind: Exploring Nonlocal Consciousness and Spiritual Healing (1998; with Jane Katra) The Mind Race: Understanding and Using Psychic Abilities (1984; with Keith Harary) Mind at Large: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Symposium on the Nature of Extrasensory Perception (1979, 2002; with Charles Tart and Harold Puthoff) Mind Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability (1977; with Harold Puthoff) Limitless M I N D a guide to remote viewing and transformation of consciousness RUSSELL TARG New World Library Novato, California www.newworldlibrary.com New World Library 14 Pamaron Way Novato, California 94949 The cartoons on pages 58 and 99 are reprinted by permission of the New Yorker. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2004 by Russell Targ All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Front cover design by Cathey Flickinger Text design and typography by Tona Pearce Myers Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Targ, Russell. Limitless mind : a guide to remote viewing and transformation of consciousness / Russell Targ. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57731-413-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Remote viewing (Parapsychology) 2. Extrasensory perception. I. Title. BF1389.R45T37 2004 133.8—dc22 2003021766 First Printing, January 2004 ISBN 1-57731-413-1 Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer waste recycled paper Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is dedicated to the memory of my beloved daughter Dr. Elisabeth Targ, visionary psychiatrist and gifted healer, and with limitless love to my teacher Gangaji. CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AUTHOR’S PREFACE FOREWORD by Jean Houston INTRODUCTION The Unknowable End of Science CHAPTER ONE Our Limitless Mind: Living in a Nonlocal Universe CHAPTER TWO On a Clear Day We Can See Forever: What We Know about Remote Viewing CHAPTER THREE For Your Viewing Pleasure: How You Can Practice Remote Viewing CHAPTER FOUR Precognition: There’s No Time Like the Future — or the Past CHAPTER FIVE Intuitive Medical Diagnosis: Things to Do Before the Doctor Arrives CHAPTER SIX Distant Healing: Is It My Mind over Your Matter? CHAPTER SEVEN Why Bother with ESP? Discovering That You Are the Love You Seek AFTERWORD Elisabeth’s Story NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX ABOUT THE AUTHOR ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to give my profound thanks to my friend and teacher, Dr. H. Dean Brown. A spirit such as Dean’s, which has now gained independence from all bondage and achieved absolute consciousness, resides in the realm of ritam bhara pragyam. Dean often described this as “the plane of the absolute.” This Sanskrit phrase refers to the level of consciousness that knows only truth: the part of us that is unaffected by our daily experiences and is the home of our soul; the clearest, most direct source for answers on our journey. Dean, who was a distinguished physicist, a mystic, and a Sanskrit scholar, taught that emptiness (sunyata) is where we encounter this plane of experience, the domain of eternal form. This is a Vedic concept that corresponds to Plato’s field of ideals, Jung’s archetypes, and De Chardin’s noosphere. The pinnacle of Vedic thought is the idea that our innermost self (Atman—ever more subtle, ever contracting) is identical to the entire universe (Brahman — ever expanding, cosmic). We are one with everything. For the thirty years when I knew him, Dean taught that when we approach the universe — play with it, understand it, and produce effects through our pure center — life becomes active and joyful. If we are simply centered, we become nothing and everything. Erwin Schrödinger, who perfected quantum mechanics and was revered by Dean, believed this equating of Atman and Brahman to be “the grandest of all thoughts.” I also wish to sincerely thank Dr. Jane Katra, with whom I wrote two previous books, for stimulating many of the ideas in this book as well. And I thank Dr. Elizabeth Rauscher for her insightful contributions to the chapters that discuss the end of physics and the physics of psychic abilities. AUTHOR’S PREFACE I consider science an integrating part of our endeavor to answer the one great philosophical question which embraces all others — who are we? And more than that: I consider this not only one of the tasks, but the task, of science, the only one that really counts. — Erwin Schrödinger Science and Humanism I have been investigating and writing about remote viewing and extrasensory perception (ESP) for more than thirty years. In this book, I will try to answer the critical question, “Why bother with ESP?” In an author’s preface, the reader often has an opportunity to find out who the author is and what is on his mind. My mind is presently filled with a mixture of anger, grief, and sadness at the recent and untimely death of my dear daughter Elisabeth, who left us in July of 2002 at the age of forty. She was an openhearted psychiatrist, a courageous researcher, a linguist, and a healer who often worked with me. Although she was a practicing Buddhist with a Jewish upbringing, from her sickbed she expressed the desire to be “the Virgin Mary’s assistant” — very much in line with her research in distant healing and distant prayer. I have included more about Elisabeth’s research and our father-daughter ESP experiments and adventures in the Afterword. Elisabeth was an inspiration to many people within and beyond the medical research community. She also brightened my life and inspired me to write this book. I would not have been introduced to the possibilities of limitless mind if Elisabeth and her husband, physicist Mark Comings, had not been so passionate about the Dzogchen (great perfection) teachings of the twelfth-century Buddhist master Longchenpa.1 In his books I experienced the magic of trading the fear and suffering of our contemporary conditioned awareness for the peace and freedom of timeless existence. As the visionary philosopher Gurdjieff describes our condition, we are each like “a machine controlled by accidental shocks from outside.” This is what we must overcome. As a scientist, I am comfortable saying that Dzogchen teaches us to look directly at our awareness and experience the geometry of consciousness — the relationship of our awareness to the space-time in which we live. Properly understood, these teachings of expanded awareness and the experience of spaciousness are not about self improvement or gaining power; they are about selfrealization: discovering who we really are. Such teaching predates by more than eight centuries my own efforts for the past decade to show people how to develop their psychic abilities. To my mind, the self or ego is not who we are. This can be revealed in many ways, one of them being the practice of remote viewing. Among other things, we discover through this process that we are the flow of loving awareness that is available to us whenever we are quiet and peaceful. This is the underlying theme of Limitless Mind. I believe that, in this plane of illusion, we give life all the meaning it has for us. We give meaning to everything we experience based on our lifelong conditioning. As it is articulated in The Tibetan Book of the Dead,2 “As a thing is viewed, so it appears.” It appears to me that we are, first and foremost, looking for the experience of love. In a meditative state of mind, we can become aware that we are not a body, but rather limitless, nonlocal awareness animating or residing as a body. Resting in the spacious flow of loving awareness — which some call God — we discover that we already have, right now within us, everything we could possibly be looking for. This is what the Hindus call ananda, and what Jesus called “the peace that passeth understanding.” Our needs and wants are the illusions. The spiritual path called A Course in Miracles teaches: “I am not a body. I am free... as God created me.”3 In Limitless Mind, I will demonstrate that this is a testable hypothesis that does not require belief in anything. The data from remote viewing research show, without a doubt, that our mind is limitless and that our awareness both fills and transcends our ordinary understanding of space and time. Psychic abilities, and remote viewing in particular, point to the possibility of our residing in — and as — this state of expanded, timeless, fearless, spacious awareness. Psychic abilities are neither sacred nor secular; they are just natural human abilities. We can use them to find lost car keys or elusive parking spaces, to forecast changes in the stock market, or to discover who we really are. I believe that 99 percent of the value of psychic abilities resides in the opportunity they offer for self-inquiry and self-realization. Let’s see if we can accomplish this together. Russell Targ Palo Alto, California August 4, 2002 (Elisabeth Targ’s forty-first birthday) FOREWORD In this small book is compressed a world of ideas — a formula for new ways of being. Within a sturdy background of scientific research and years of conclusive studies, it presents a perspective on our humanity that, until now, would have seemed more mythic than real. Many have long suspected that the very concepts of “near” and “far” may be a stratagem of our local minds — more a habit or a cultural dictum than the way things really are.