Yes, I Have No (Psychic) Bananas
by Author X
The basis for this article was originally a response to a post on the Technical Remote Viewers Remote Viewing Discussion Email List. The original poster was talking about the ambient "animosity" TRV groups have towards "natural psychics."
I feel compelled to respond to this, because I think it explains a lot of the so-called "animosity" in the remote viewing community as well as my own feelings on the matter.
Something very special happened when Ingo Swann first documented his psychic process in a way that people who were as "psychic as a box of rocks" could actually follow the procedure and thereby push themselves through that mysterious gateway of the mind that allows one to access knowledge that is not your own. I don't think a lot of people truly realize the extent of this. When I first heard about PSI TECH on the radio, talking about Technical Remote Viewing, it immediately clicked. I could care less about whatever story of the week he had to say. I dug right under that and knew, absolutely knew, that this was something Very Different. By nature I used to be a True Believer, wanting everything to be more special and magical than it really is, trying to dig my life out from underneath the crushing weight of boredom and predictability. However life experience has taught me to be a skeptic. Let me elaborate.
On one hand, we have the psychic camp. I hear from these people all the time. They are the ones that always have either a totally sunny disposition or a complete end-of-the-world-is-neigh disposition. Coincidentally, this is also indicative of a handful of mental disorders. But I digress. They always have a story for you. "My travels on beams of light," or "My spirit guide showed me how to wash my dishes with love," or "My fifth cousin Johnny can heal with his tongue," or similar. The thread that I have learned to recognize in all of their stories and claims is egotism. Each account, no matter how wild or irrelevant always shows this same thread, like a bright red cord running through a worn pair of blue jeans. It only takes a small amount of time to pick up on this thread in any psychic "look-at-me" story, whether based in truth, fantasy, or a mixture of both.
As much as the so-called skeptic camp (and believe me, I know this runs the other way just as bad... see the fanboys of James Randi -- they wouldn't believe in illness if they caught a cold) holds fast to the idea that nothing or very little in this universe is special and truly "mystical," these natural psychics (we'll call them True Believers) can't grasp or accept the fact that something may just very well be Not Special. It's an anathema to their mind that something is perhaps just boring and ordinary. Personally it wears me down. Every time the weather changes it's screaming on Art Bell or whatever other forum will host their hyperactive minds, about how the government is experimenting in climate control or mass poisoning or anything else that can be conceived of.
On the other hand, we do have as I mentioned the True Disbelievers. These are people who, being so fearful of the world and so insecure in their own abilities, take personal and immediate offense to anything that challenges their delicately crafted mental rule set. For the same reasons, they absolutely cannot afford to accept that they may be wrong, or have diverged from reality for any reason. Unfortunately these people tend to be even more vocal, because unlike the True Believers, the True Disbelievers not only want you to sit up and pat them on the head and give them attention, they require your utter and complete submission to their paradigm structure.
It's a bit more difficult to identify this agenda when they are not in napalm mode, flaming everything in sight. The only true test is time. If you can't tell if something is real or not, do you have the patience (and self-confidence) to allow it to sit and develop further? Fortunately we do have a new way to test things.
As a new, third group, we have Remote Viewers. The odd bit about these people is that they are more increasingly being drawn from the populace at large. (Originally the RV set consisted of visionaries and people from the True Believers crowd, willing to give anything a shot, as well as a handful of True Disbelievers who set out to utterly show how fake Remote Viewing was and then realized they might actually be wrong about something.) The Remote Viewers are really right smack in the middle of the bell curve. They'll say, "ok, maybe Elvis is alive, but Chem-trails? Hah!"
And this new group does something very interesting. It simultaneously threatens both of the established paranoia camps.
The True Believers want to use Remote Viewing (often claiming to have performed this skill from birth... something likely true in some cases but nonetheless not the same as structured remote viewing via protocols) to further validate their paradigms. The True Disbelievers want to use this as something to further demonstrate how very sick people in general are and how intelligent and correct they are in being above delusion. Both of these accomplish nothing but to add to the noise surrounding just about every possible topic.
And so the hapless Remote Viewers end up besieged by not one, but two firmly established and well-experienced (in the art of mental masturbation) parties. Look guys, most of the RV'ers are normal joes. They don't have special powers. They don't have personal interest in validating this idea or that, or disproving anything else. We don't care if you think the military is gassing your children while they sleep using UFO technology. We don't care if you want to only believe that sticks and stones are 100% of reality and anything beyond it is fantasy. And that's what really pisses everyone off.
As standard, middle-of-the-bell-curve Joes, Remote Viewers aren't in a position to pander to either end of the spectrum. In fact, just like the telltale red cord I mentioned earlier, you can tell when someone who has learned Remote Viewing is actually applying it or not, because when they don't they will instantly stick to one of the old positions like glue and become personally threatened whenever you want to push them the other way. And it's worse when they can collect themselves enough to sound authentic. At that point you've got someone who has claimed to Remote View this or that, and has positively identified something for all of known time. Of course, the real RV camp will sound out and say, "hey, you sound like you're full of donkey doo" and then the flames begin. It's an age-old battle that will never be won.
So eventually as average Joe Remote Viewers, we learn to just stick to the road and ignore things that come flying out of left field or right field (unless of course there is some indication it is valid, or we just get bored), and we keep to the straight path. For that, we are called aloof, uncaring, dispassionate, liars and frauds, or even psycho by the two paradigm camps. As people with no investment in either extreme, we simply have the ability to accept all of the spectrum, from bizarre to boringly real. Further, we've often already seen first-hand via this technology a lot of lies uncovered and a lot of odd stories verified. We know that the pendulum of truth swings both ways.
The moral of this story is that if you have an agenda to serve, don't bring it out into the light. You'll only be revealed in the end and it will piss you off. Dramatic innuendos have no place here, only staunch truth and reality. And sometimes as investigative Remote Viewers we're going to get called on a mistake. That's fine too -- this is an applied skill, not an infallible God-given birthright. The end result is a better understanding of what is really out there, whether that aligns with my personal paradigms or not. But guess what... no matter what you bring to the table, be prepared to be questioned and tested. That's why I snort when someone claims to "have solved problem 'X' so there is no need to TRV it," or absolutely "has important facts you all need to know," about conspiracies or some such.
In the end, it is because of the constant flinging of "100% accurate ideas" that there is so much animosity flying around the RV community, because we have this real war of egos going on here. And despite having the tool of Remote Viewing, we can't always apply it when we would like. It's not the same as forming an idea or concept... Remote Viewing takes hard work, and we don't always have the time to apply it to something non-essential. And so we anger those people who feel the need to be validated, turn the wheel again, and have to navigate the ego minefield once more.
I for one will keep my kevlar jacket firmly buttoned, and may the best paradigm win.
