The Farsight Institute of Scientific Remote Viewing
- What kind of targets are used during training in scientific remote viewing?
Nearly all training targets are of the normal physical (and completely verifiable) variety. The Great Wall of China, the Oval Office in the White House, Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park, a specific polluting factory, and a graphic scene captured in a picture in, say, National Geographic Magazine are typical of the types of targets used during training. With but a few exceptions, only advanced remote viewers are given targets that lack a complete and immediate feedback capability. But even with these cases, some degree of feedback is always necessary to provide at least partial verifiability.
- Where is Farsight Voyager Taught, and Where Do Students Stay?
The facilities used by The Farsight Institute for teaching are in a hotel conveniently located near downtown Atlanta. Students live for one week in the same hotel in which the classes are held. The cost of the course covers both tuition as well as room and board for the entire week.
- How many students are there in a class at The Farsight Institute?
Class sizes are determined by how many students work together during review sessions in which each student's work is evaluated. We typically have no more than eight students in any review session. This is large enough to allow all students to benefit interactively from a sufficiently broad exposure to other students' work, while remaining small enough to offer individualized attention to each student during the review of his or her own work.
- Why train in small groups rather than individually, one-on-one?
Dr. Brown, and most of his colleagues at The Farsight Institute, were originally trained in one-on-one training programs that lasted about one week. Thus, we have experience with the one-on-one type of training setting, and we find it to be inferior to training in small groups as long as the training is conducted the way it is conducted at The Farsight Institute. Dr. Brown, a professional educator and college professor, designed the training program that is used at The Farsight Institute in order to solve many of the problems that he felt existed with some of the existing training designs. After each session, the students observe the instructor evaluate everyone's sessions. This is the most important part of training in small groups, and this parallels the optimal learning environment that is found at the best colleges and universities. By watching the individual evaluations, the students learn not only from the mistakes made in their own sessions, but also from the mistakes made in the sessions of others. The end product is a rich training process in which students learn not only from the instructor by also from the experiences of each other. From a heuristic perspective, it is also important to note that students tend to be tremendously impressed by the fact that the others in the room are also collecting accurate data. Oddly, it is easier for individuals to dismiss their own work as a product of chance than it is for them to dismiss the work of, say, seven others. Finally, in the later parts of training, students get to work with each other while learning how to monitor sessions. Who can they monitor if there are no other students? (The instructor is already a professional remote viewer and monitoring him or her will not give a student a fair idea of the skill and control that is necessary on the part of the monitor.) Working with other students is also important so that the students avoid developing a psychological dependence on a single instructor. In short, the position of The Farsight Institute is that students benefit greatly from learning in small groups as long as the environment is intelligently structured, and that this group/workshop setting is vastly superior to learning remote viewing one-on-one, as when a single student is matched with a single instructor. There is nothing magical about remote viewing. It is not something that needs to be "bestowed" on a student by an elite, seemingly "divinely-chosen" instructor. Remote viewing is like anything else that can be taught. The teaching is delicate, but its delicacy can be handled within an intelligently controlled teaching environment by a properly trained instructor. At The Farsight Institute, we now train our own instructors to work within the Institute's educational setting.
- What is the teaching environment like at The Farsight Institute?
At the Institute, students are trained in a large room specifically chosen and designed for the training. The color of the room is dull, typically powder blue-often toward gray. Each student is separated from the other students by thick, similarly dull-colored office panels. The students face the wall with their own dark-colored desks. The writing surface of the desks is covered with similarly a dark-colored and specially chosen surface material to reduce pen/paper friction while writing.The instructor even wears dull colored clothing. In short, the physical training environment is designed to separate the students visually from each other while simultaneously limiting the activation of their imagination, important components of initial training.
- What is the accuracy of scientific remote viewing?
As employed by the U.S. Army, remote viewing had a reported approximate 85% accuracy rate. This was measured in a variety of ways, and there is still no agreement as to which is the best way to measure accuracy at the current time. In general, accuracy can be thought of in terms of the percent of the data in a single remote viewing session that is accurate. But alternatively, accuracy can be measured as the percent of the sessions that a particular remote viewer accomplishes that clearly indicate that the viewer was collecting target-specific data (as compared with being off in the deep blue sea). The problem with deciding which measure to use is that remote viewers typically experience a "bracketing effect." Evidence of this is when data collected in the beginning of a session are not as accurate as those collected closer to the end of the session when the remote viewer is more closely aware of the target's nature. Thus, if one counts only the data from the end of any particular session, then the accuracy of remote viewing data with respect to most sessions is more likely to be very high, while the average for entire sessions from beginning to end would be lower. To complicate matters, experience using scientific remote viewing sharply enhances the accuracy a remote viewer's data.
- What is the connection between Transcendental Meditation and scientific remote viewing?
Preliminary evidence collected by remote viewers associated with The Farsight Institute indicate that when scientific remote viewing is combined with regular practice of Transcendental Meditation ™ or the more advanced TM-Sidhi Program, session-by-session accuracy increases dramatically (above the 85% mentioned above) with many (and perhaps most) remote viewers. Data on this are still being collected and analyzed, and this remains one of the most exciting areas of current remote viewing research. This in no way implies that the TM-Movement in any way endorses or supports either officially or unofficially the practice of remote viewing, regardless of the form of the protocols used. This us just an observation of the nature of the data that are being collected.
- What is the connection between what is taught at The Monroe Institute and scientific remote viewing?
Current research indicates that systematic exposure to the Hemi-Sync process that has been developed by The Monroe Institute tremendously enhances the ability of remote viewers to engage in telepathic interaction with telepathically capable beings during remote viewing sessions. Reading a target-person's mind seems to be similarly enhanced by systematic exposure to the Hemi-Sync process. Much of this is described by Dr. Courtney Brown in his book, Cosmic Voyage: A Scientific Discover of Extraterrestrials Visiting Earth (Dutton 1996).
- Is it necessary to learn TM or to attend The Monroe Institute's courses before learning scientific remote viewing?
No. If a student wants to do these other things (which is HIGHLY recommended from the perspective of enhancing remote viewing abilities in our opinion), they can be done after attending courses at The Farsight Institute. Indeed, many people find that learning how to remote view sparks their desire to do other activities in the area of consciousness. We explain the details relating to all of these things during the course.
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