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CHAPTER NINE
While flicking through it, Targ was flabbergasted to read:
It also included a photo of the site, which clearly showed two tanks.
Russ remembered Pat’s drawing and pulled it out; the tanks were
exactly in the place that Pat Price had drawn them. When Pat ‘saw’
the site, he saw it as it had been 50 years ago, even though all
evidence of the water purification plant had long since
disap-peared.1
Nevertheless, the results were virtually identical to
those obtained when the participants were at the PEAR lab, sitting
right in front of a machine. Distance, even great distance, didn’t
seem to lessen a person’s effect on the machine.2
Indeed, the most tangible evidence of the progression
of time is the physical fact of our own ageing.
If subatomic particles can interact across all space and time, then so might the larger matter they compose.
In the quantum world of The Field, a subatomic world of pure potential, life exists as one enormous present.
Jahn had his own store of evidence showing that people could foretell events.
Largely because of similar work conducted by Brenda Dunne at Mundelein College, Dunne and Jahn had designed most of their remote viewing studies as ‘precognitive remote perception’, or PRP. The remote viewers remaining behind in the PEAR lab were asked to name their traveling partner’s destinations not only before they actually got there, but also many hours or days before they even knew where they were going.
Someone not involved in the experiment would use a REG to randomly pick the traveler’s destinations from a pool of previously chosen targets, or the traveler could choose the destination spontaneously and on his own, after setting off. The traveling partner would then follow the standard protocol of remote viewing experiments.
He’d spend 10 to 15 minutes at the target site,
at the assigned time, recording his impressions of it, taking photos
and following the checklist of questions produced by the PEAR team.
Meanwhile, back at the laboratory, the remote viewer would have to
record and draw his or her impressions of the traveler’s
destination, from half an hour to five days before the traveler
arrived.
In one case, the traveler headed to the Northwest Railroad Station in Glencoe, Illinois, and took one photo of the station with an oncoming train and then another of the inside of the station, a drab little waiting room with a bulletin board below a sign.
In another instance, the remote viewer at the PEAR lab jotted down his ‘strange yet persistent’ image that the agent was standing inside a ‘large bowl’ - and ‘if it was full of soup [the agent] would be the size of a large dumpling’.
Forty-five minutes later, the traveler was indeed the size of a dumpling in comparison to the massive curved dome-like structure of the radio telescope in Kitt Peak, Arizona, he was standing under. Yet another PEAR participant described his partner in a ‘old building’ with ‘windows like arches’ which ‘come to a point on top almost’ but ‘not a regular point’, plus ‘great big double doors’ and ‘square pillars with balls on top’.
Nearly a day later, the traveler arrived at his destination,
the Tretiakovskaia Gallereia in Moscow, an ornate impressive
building with special pillars in front, and a large double door
beneath a pointed archway.4
But that same evening, the
traveler (who knew nothing of the remote viewer’s impressions)
visited a friend’s home, where he did indeed play with a litter of
newborn puppies, one of which he was prompted to take home with him.
The remote viewer in New Jersey,
picking up the scene before it had happened, made no mention of cows
at all in his description, but he did say that he was getting an
image of farm buildings, fields and the irrigation ditch.5
Combining a total of 2 million trials
comprising 309 studies and 50,000 participants, where the time
between guessing and the event ranged from a few milliseconds to an
entire year, Honorton found positive results with odds against them
occurring by chance of ten million billion billion to one.7
Bessent was invited to sleep at the Maimonides laboratory, where he was asked to dream about what would happen to him the following day. During the night, he would be awakened and asked to report and record his dreams. In one instance, Bessent had followed the agreed procedure for reporting his dream. The next morning, another investigator who’d had no knowledge or contact with Bessent or his dream carried out the agreed procedure for randomly selecting a target among some art reproductions of paintings. It turned out to be Van Gogh’s Hospital Corridor at Saint-Remy.
As a
further precaution against bias, the tape of Bessent’s recounting of
his dream had been wrapped up and mailed to a transcriber before the
picture had been chosen.
This
idea was a simplified variation on the dream research. The
Maimonides tests were expensive, requiring eight to ten people and a
day or so for each experiment. With Radin’s protocol, you could get
the same results in 20 minutes, at a fraction of the cost.
Radin was 50, but despite the presence of a thin black moustache and a receding hairline, he’d retained the knowing, childlike look of the child prodigy he’d once been. His particular instrument of precocity had been the violin, which he’d played from the age of five up until his mid-twenties. Only lack of physical stamina had caused him give up what might have been a promising career as a concert violinist.
World-class musical performance requires nothing less than a superb athlete willing to practice and play for hours every day, honing the mechanics of fine motor control, and Radin came to realize that nothing in his spare physical makeup possessed that level of robustness. It was natural that he would move on to his next great love, fairy tales - the prospect of a secret, magical world.
But the same type of precision and detachment that had led to his competence with the violin also made for a skillful investigator, a natural for studying forensic evidence or digging out elusive clues. His first-grade teacher noted the matter-of-fact forthrightness and seriousness of purpose in this slight child and correctly forecast his future vocation.
What Radin
really wanted to bring into his own juvenile laboratory was magic.
He’d wanted to take magic apart and study it under a microscope. By
the age of twelve he’d already begun carrying out his own ESP
investigations.
Almost immediately, Radin began getting
good results - results as good as Schmidt’s. This was too important
to be a career sideline. Radin lobbied to work with some of the
scientists already in this field, and began doing the rounds, at one
point working at SRI and then at Princeton University before setting
up his own consciousness laboratory at the University of Nevada in
Las Vegas, a remote academic outpost where he hoped he might be left
alone.10
In his lab in Las
Vegas, Dean set up a computer that would randomly select photos
designed either to calm or to agitate, arouse or upset the
participant. Radin’s volunteers would be wired up to physiological
monitors that recorded changes in skin conductance, heart rate and
blood pressure.
Naturally, study participants recorded the largest response once they’d seen the photos. However, what Radin discovered was that his subjects were also anticipating what they were about to see, registering physiological responses before they’d seen the photo. As if trying to brace themselves, their responses were highest before they saw an image that was disturbing. Blood pressure would drop in the extremities about a second before the image was flashed.
Strangest of all, possibly reflecting that Americans are more unsettled about sex than violence, Radin discovered a far higher foreboding with the erotic than with the violent. He realized that he had some of the first laboratory proof that our bodies unconsciously anticipate and act out our own future emotional states.
It also suggested that the,
Radin’s studies were successfully replicated by his Dutch counterpart, a psychologist called Dick Bierman at the University of Amsterdam.12
Bier-man went on to use this model to determine whether people anticipate good or bad news. In studying the electrodermal activity of people involved in another published study which was examining learned response in a particular type of gambling card game, Bierman found that the participants registered rapid changes in EDA response before they were handed out their cards.
Furthermore, these differences tended to correspond to the type of cards they got. Those about to receive a bad hand were more rattled and had all the hallmarks of a heightened fight-or-flight response.13
This would seem to indicate that, on a subconscious
physiological level, we have an inkling when we are about to receive
bad news or when bad things are going to happen to us.
The machine contained 10,000 different seed numbers
and so 10,000 different mathematical possibilities. The pseudorandom
number generator was designed to produce sequences of random bits,
or zeros and ones. Those sequences with the most ‘ones’ in them were
deemed the best sequences and therefore the most desirable. The
object was to stop the machine at a particular moment, on a
particular seed number, to initiate the best sequences.
As impossible as it sounded, this was
exactly what Radin and his SRI boss, Ed May, did. Over hundreds of
trials, Radin and May were somehow able to ‘know’ just when to hit
the button to achieve the favorable sequence.14
If a quantum state
was as ethereal as a fluttering butterfly, did it matter when you
tried to pin it down, so long as you were the first to attempt it -
the first observer?
Schmidt also
intermittently created tapes that were to act as controls, those
where no one would ever try to affect its left–right clicks. As
expected, when they were played, these control tapes had left and
right ear clicks that were more or less evenly distributed.
Furthermore, these results were
just as good as his ordinary REG tests, as good as if someone had
been sitting in front of the machine.
They didn’t change what had happened; they affected
what would have happened in the first place. Present or future
intentions act on initial probabilities and determine what events
actually come into being.
Of all the studies on time
travel, Schmidt’s were probably the safest. Since a copy of the
results had been made and locked away, it eliminated the possibility
of fraud. What they showed decisively was that PK effects on a
random system like a REG machine can occur at any time, past or
future.
It suggests that observation
by living observers brings things into some sort of set being.16
Once they looked at the data, what they found was incredible. In every regard, this data was identical to the more conventional data they’d generated when their experimenters were attempting their influence at the time the machine was being run - the differences between women and men were still there and overall population distortions were the same.
There was just one
important difference. In the ‘time-displaced’ experiments, the
volunteers were getting bigger effects than in the standard
experiments every time they’d willed the machine to produce heads.
However, because of the relatively small numbers, Jahn and Dunne had
to deem this weird effect non-significant.17
The revolutions on the wheels and hits of the photobeam were converted into clicks, and taped, stored and played for the first time between one day and a week later to observers, who attempted to influence the gerbils to run faster or the people or cars to run into the beam more often. Another study attempted to see if a healer could retroactively influence the spread of blood parasites in rats.
Braud had even done his own studies recording the EDA response of certain individuals and asking them to review their response and try to influence their own EDAs. Radin had carried out a similar study with EDA tapes and healers. Schmidt had studies where he’d tried to affect his own prerecorded breathing rate.
All
told, ten of the nineteen studies showed effects significantly
different from chance - enough to indicate that something out of the
ordinary was going on here.18
Radin’s opposite number, University of Amsterdam’s Dick Bierman, believed you could account for precognition through a well-known quantum phenomenon known as retarded and advanced waves - the so-called Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory, which says that a wave can travel backward in time from the future to arrive at its source. What happens between two electrons is this. When one electron jiggles a bit, it sends out radiating waves into both the past and the future. The future wave, say, would hit a future particle, which would also wiggle, while sending out its own advanced and retarded waves.
The two sets of waves from these two electrons cancel out, except in the region between them. The end result of a wave from the first traveling backward and the wave from the second traveling forward is an instantaneous connection.19
In premonitions, Radin speculated, it could be that,
on a quantum level, we are sending out waves to meet our own
future.20
An information transfer via subatomic waves doesn’t exist in time or space, but is somehow spread out and ever-present. The past and present are blurred into one vast ‘here and now’ so your brain ‘picks up’ signals and images from the past or the future. Our future already exists in some nebulous state that we may begin to actualize in the present.
This makes sense if we consider
that all subatomic particles exist in a state of all potential
unless observed - which would include being thought about.
These waves can travel far faster than the speed of light - like Puthoff ’s imagined tachyons. Laszlo proposes that it is scalar waves that encode the information of space and time into a timeless, spaceless quantum shorthand of interference patterns. In Laszlo’s model, this bot-tom-rung level of the Zero Point Field - the mother of all fields - provides the ultimate holographic blueprint of the world for all time, past and future.
It is this that we tap into when we see into the past or
future.21
Bohm’s
model viewed time as part of a larger reality, which could project
many sequences or moments into consciousness, not necessarily in a
linear order. He argued that as relativity theory says that space
and time are relative and in effect a single entity (space-time) and
if quantum theory stipulates that elements that are separated in
space are connected and projections of a higher-dimensional reality,
it follows that moments separated in time are also projections of
this larger reality.
Now, we have
been led to propose that it is secondary and that, like space, it is
to be derived from a higher-dimensional ground, as a particular
order. Indeed, one can further say that many such particular
interrelated time orders can be derived for different sets of
sequences of moments, corresponding to material systems that travel
at different speeds. However, these are all dependent on a
multidimensional reality that cannot be comprehended fully in terms
of any time order, or set of such orders.23
Time-displaced human intention somehow acts on the probabilities of some occurrence to bring about an outcome, and works best on what Braud liked to call ‘seed moments’ - the first of a chain of events.
So, if you applied these principles to physical or mental health, it
could mean that we could use The Field to direct influences ‘back in
time’ to alter pivotal moments or initial conditions which later
bloom into full-blown problems or disease.
That simple first decision might eventually make the
difference between health and illness, or even death. There may be a
score of ways that we could use intention in the future to change
probabilities before they develop into full-blown disease. In fact,
even the diagnosis itself might influence the future course of the
disease and so should be approached with caution.
But some of the most harmful aspects of it might not have been actualized yet and might still be susceptible to change.
You’d catch a disease at a point where it could be swayed in many directions, from good health to death. Braud pondered whether any cases of spontaneous remission had been caused by a future intention acting upon a disease before the point of no return. It might well be that every moment of our lives influences every other moment, forward and backward.
As in The Terminator films, we might be able to go back in
time to affect our own future.24
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