Why Learn Remote Viewing?

Many times since starting to teach controlled remote viewing commercially, I've been asked variations of the question "Why do people want to learn remote viewing?"or "What good is remote viewing?"

I've thought about it for a long time, and have come to the following conclusion. Maybe people want to learn remote viewing for reasons similar to why others learn to skydive.

This may seem a little surprising at first, but let's start off by asking, "what good is skydiving?" There are of course a number of answers: It is useful in military and commando operations; it is handy for getting people to remote places to fight forest fires; it can be used to insert rescue personnel into certain emergency situations. However, the vast majority of people learn to skydive, and continue doing it, not for any so-called practical reason. They do it because it presents a challenge--the thrill of overcoming nature (gravity) and the natural human fears that come with it. Or it puts them in a class of people who do something beyond the ordinary--something that takes skill and self-mastery. Or they simply glory in the experience of hanging all alone, however briefly, thousands of feet above the earth.

This seems also to be the case with remote viewing - though not literally, of course. Like skydiving, RV has its practical applications. Within its inherent limitations remote viewing has been used in intelligence collection, crime-solving, finding missing persons, market predictions, and--more controversially--space exploration. Yet most people who learn it do so not because of practical applications so much as the challenge it represents--learning to do something that few other people as yet know how to do; or acquiring a skill deemed impossible under the currently ruling scientific paradigm; or because it provides convincing and satisfying proof that we are, indeed, much more than our physical bodies.

While skydivers learn that it is possible to transcend the physical fears and bodily limitations that we normally think we are subject to, remote viewers learn something analogous: that it is possible to transcend not only those limitations, but the boundaries of space and time as well.

11/15/97 © 1997 by Paul H. Smith,
Remote Viewing Instructional Services, Inc.
All rights reserved.