(sunrise this morning)

I spent much of the last weekend listening to Major Ed Dames’ book “Tell Me What You See” – named for the most common question asked of his team of remote viewers who worked in the US Army through the eighties and early nineties.

Maj. Dames is a well known “psychic spy,” the first of his kind, and the first to go public with his work since retirement. Now you know the stuff he talks about are events no longer classified: POW rescue efforts after the Viet Nam war, locating chemical and biological weapons facilities in Russian territory, encountering psychic attack from the Soviet equivalent of the US Psy-Spy unit… Just makes my hair curl to imagine the things he knows but isn’t saying, what these units are capable of today.

Maj. Dames describes his work as “remote viewing” and he would never describe himself as a psychic. Dames holds a lot of animosity towards psychics, mediums and channels, calling them “bitches and witches”. He has good reason to be resentful. Intuitive psychics are not typically as accurate or skilled at locating specific information, such as the precise location of a hidden base. The “witch” in Dames’ department had located hidden POWs to within 100 km, but Dames’ team of remote viewers had located the soldiers *precisely*. The conflicting information cost the men their lives.

Plenty of reason to be bitter, has Maj. Dames.

Despite the sad stories, Dames’ book really has me quite excited. Accuracy and precision of information is something I’ve been striving for, and I have a lot of fear about the possibility of passing on misinterpreted or inaccurate information.

I know that it’s possible to glean consistently accurate information from the ether – my great-grandmother earned her reputation through accurately describing the location, the condition and the date of return of lost soldiers during WWII. If my grandmother could do it, I can do it. I just wasn’t sure how.

Now I know. I’m certain she was using not vague intuitive impressions or channelled guides – she was remote-viewing. I’m certain of it.

The whole point behind my interest in channelling – the technique of allowing a spirit to communicate directly through you instead of interpreting as you do as a medium – was to improve my accuracy. It’s an important goal – the more precise the information I can convey, the less interpretation is required on the part of the client.

The only time I’ve been flat out wrong was when I allowed my own intellect to interpret information I’d received – intellect is always limited by what you don’t know, by the assumptions you take for granted.

Well the technique Dames describes just eliminates the possibility of anyone’s intellect or imagination interfering with the information from the ether. He calls this “coordinate remote viewing”.

In a nutshell, say you want to locate your aunt’s lost ring. You create a search term for the big database that is the collective experience: aunt Lilly’s ring / current location

You write the search term on a piece of paper, then place it in a sealed envelope. Then you write a series of randomly generated numbers on the envelope, say: 6432/8894. The numbers are the search coordinates.

Now you can begin the remote viewing session… But *you* won’t be the one doing the work. In Maj. Dames’ case, you bring the search coordinates to your team, be them highly trained army officers or your group of 70 students wanting to learn the technique.

Learn be doing, people.

Your team will have no information at all but the search coordinates. They will have no tools but pen and paper.

Dames describes in his book the process of stages, beginning with a wide scope in the first session, then returning to the search coordinates time and again to build on the information.

In some cases, the search term will need to be refined: maybe all anyone’s getting are pictures of a dusty attic . Whose attic is it? The search term could be refined to: aunt Lilly’s ring/most recently worn

A new set of search coordinates would be generated and the team could get images from the last event the ring was worn, or the last person to wear it. Search terms need to be selected with skill, and sometimes several search terms are required to circle and lock in on the “target”.

The beauty of this technique is the significant reduction in the temptation to interpret information intellectually by knowing anything about what you’re searching for. You’re not trying to make sense of it, put information into context.

I’ve never encountered a description of remote viewing in this way. I’ve actually done it before, accidentally – projected my consciousness to another location and observed every detail of the room for an instant. I had written it off as a quirk until I found myself in that location a few days later, noticing significant details and confirming what I’d seen in my mind. It’s not a skill I’ve worked to develop, however, being more of a talker, I’d rather engage dead people than skulk around, invisible, eyeballs in the ether. But now, I see the possibilities.

I’ll give you an example of a recent mistake of mine: my friend asked me about the possible home she would find if she decided to move to a different town. I saw fields, smelled horses and described it to her. I said it would be rurally isolated but worth the commute.

We then proceeded to interpret the information intellectually, within our framework of assumptions: she would likely find an opportunity to move to the agricultural part of the island, but would commute to work in a nearby town. WRONG.

Later that week, a mutual friend in Saskatchewan offered her the use of her house rent-free. The house will be empty for two years while this friend works in the Alberta oil patch.

It’s an unbelievable opportunity, and Saskatchewan: the land of fields and horses. It turned out the “commute” will be frequent flights back to BC for work, but it will be worth it because living rent-free opens a lot of possibilities, time and money-wise.

The information is correct, the interpretation was wrong.

Another thing I learned from Maj. Dames book was the time investment required to get specific, accurate information using coordinate remote viewing. Remote viewing sessions of military targets could go on for 12 hours or more, for days in a row, although he says in other contexts the sessions are usually 45mins long.

As I understand this, I can see how irresponsible it can potentially be for a tv psychic to rattle off information about a missing child in ten seconds. I thought these psychics must just be *really good*. Then I read about a couple who was on the Montel Williams show; they went public after Sylvia Browne’s 10 second blurb yielded no results, except a great deal of emotional anguish on the part of the family. This case is often cited by the “Sylvia Browne is a fraud” camp. Sylvia’s had more than enough confirmations to prove her skill, but there it is, the reason I’ve been so uncomfortable with her for years.

Maj. Dames and a team of volunteers have devoted weeks of their lives and thousands of dollars in travel costs while using remote viewing to locate missing children… Although they frequently come up empty-handed too.

While Maj. Dames uses the blind team technique for missing children, he also wrote about using the technique solo to learn about all sorts of things. He’s accurately predicted natural disasters, terrorist attacks, financial crisis (but who didn’t see that coming?) – he’s built such a reputation for bad news predictions, he’s earned the nickname “Dr Doom”.

He doesn’t describe the solo technique in much detail, and I believe the real skill is the same as mediumship: learning to set aside or disable the intellectual part of your brain to allow information to arrive exclusively from outside yourself. By holding random numbers in your mind rather than specific information, it frees up more of your mind to receptivity.

I read the reviews on audible.com, and I agree there’s a significant ego issue present in Dames’ retelling of his stories. It’s typically ironic that the characteristics he despises in psychics and “witches” are his own worst faults… And Dames himself is wracked with guilt for his contribution to deadly military operatives, and miscalculations regarding his own information. I think it’s funny that he hasn’t noticed that psychic mediumship and remote viewing are very similar skills, and Dames scoffs at sideshow gypsies who talk to the dead, while alluding to his own contact with extra-terrestrial worlds.

But then, there’s my own bias too.

He doesn’t mention anything about reincarnation, past lives or his own spirituality. For a man who’s lived his life witnessing the worst acts of our species, maybe he doesn’t believe in God or the afterlife at all… But I find it difficult to believe that he’s spent decades in the RV theatre and hasn’t encountered one out of body spirit, or ghost, or angel.

If he has, he isn’t saying.

What I love the most about Maj. Dames’ book is the idea of a World Without Secrets. So many terrible events on earth require secrecy, from government manipulation of public perception, to the perpetuation of negative cultural norms.

When a significant portion of the population is psychic, secrets can no longer hide. Maybe we’ll finally move towards a planet of unity, balance and peace. Maybe enough people will be motivated to set things right, to use their new perceptions to help people; maybe more leaders will listen to them.

One note of caution future readers: this book can inspire fear about psychic spies and potential weaponry. For some, the future Earth populated by psychic ninjas is a twisted distopia, a place we may wonder if we’re already inhabiting.

I just want to remind you: it’s our minds which create our reality. You choose the world you create.