Remote Viewing and Prayer
By Kimberly Snow
In past issues of The Matrix and PSI TECH's ezine, The Signal Line, we have discussed the fundamentals of what the Matrix is, how it operates and how we access it to retrieve data. The main comparison we have made to what the Matrix is would be similarities to Jung's theory of a Collective Unconscious, a central "data bank" where all the information on everything that was, is and will be exists as patterns of information. Since we are all tapped into this source at all times, through our own personal unconscious, we are part of the Matrix, changing it on a daily basis through our thoughts and actions.
For the past 25 years up until his death in 1998, Eugene D'Aquili, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, had been researching prayer and meditation and the experience of "oneness" and connectedness that is felt when one has a transcendental experience through the deepest states of meditation and prayer. Andrew Newberg, a physician and fellow in the Division of Nuclear Medicine, also at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, had been D'Aquili's associate for ten years. In 1999 their findings were published in The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Mystical Experience. A re-editing of their findings was recently published, entitled Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief.
The experiments they conducted were performed on the brains of Tibetan monks and Franciscan nuns while in deep states of prayer. A special radioactive dye was injected into their bloodstreams, which then traveled to the brain and locked onto brain cells. This showed the researchers the patterns of the blood's flow in the brain at the moment of the monks' and nuns' transcendental experiences. D'Aquili and Newberg were then able to see which parts of the brain were being utilized, and exactly what was happening during the process.
What they found was that during prayer, the frontal lobes are highly active, increasing beyond their normal state. This is the area of the brain that controls your state of attention. It is well known that prayer "experts" around the globe, such as the Tibetan Monks, are intensely focused and in a state of high attention when they pray.
The second thing that was occurring was a decrease of activity in the posterior parietal areas of the brain. This is the part of the brain that gives you your sense of self, separates everything "outside" of you, from you, and gives you a sense of individualism. Also it is the part responsible for spatial orientation.
Newberg writes of the posterior parietal areas of the brain, "What if the area was working as hard as ever, but somehow the act of meditating had blocked its flow of sensory input? We were fascinated by this possibility."
"Would the orientation area," he continued, "interpret its failure to find the borderline between the self and the outside world to mean such a distinction doesn't exist? In that case the brain would have no choice but to perceive that the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses. And this perception would feel utterly and unquestionably real."
People from all over the world, from all cultures and walks of life, when describing their experiences during deep prayer or meditation, have many similarities. The most significant and common similarity is that feeling of connectedness with an ALL, a transcendence of the sense of individual, and a merging with a collective force in the universe in which we are all a part of a whole. It would appear as if by connected with this All, life takes a new meaning for them. They slough off the idea that they are lonely isolated individuals ruled by their all-knowing egos, and emerge anew, seeing the world as a rich and diverse place in which they are somehow connected.
So how does this relate to TRV? Well, when I first read about the prayer study, I immediately considered the theory of The Matrix, and the effects that TRV has on many of our trainees. One of the most exciting things that we hear when they first start practicing TRV is that they suddenly feel as if the old boundaries of what they knew about the world and their place in it suddenly changes dramatically. The universe becomes a much vaster place, and they feel connected in ways they never before experienced. TRV proves that there is a collective source "out there" that we are all part of and that we can tap into whenever we please. With the knowledge that we are actively participating in its dynamic nature, comes a sense of oneness that we previously were not able to understand or tap into.
With this new understanding also comes a sense of humility, as the rapacious ego of our individual consciousness is left at the door along with the rest of our conscious clockwork while we TRV. We seem to abandon our sense of separateness, close the door on the part of the mind that tells us "Look at me! Let me think this through for you! I know everything!" and instead let go and trust in the process of TRV, letting our unconscious tap into the collective source. That is where truth is found. That is where we can reach true knowledge untainted by our limiting sense of self. In a way, it is much like the spiritual transcendence that the monks and nuns say they feel while in deep prayer.
We are reluctant to describe TRV as "an experience", because it is inherently "an attention management skill." TRV is an active conscientious act that activates and controls an innate passive ability. There is no praying or meditating involved to TRV. It is simply a tool for the mind which allows us to access information. However, TRVers do find that their frames of reference shift dramatically. Their priorities begin to change, from that of feeding the ego, to that of searching and finding answers to the age-old questions, "Why am I here?"
