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become known as the akashic records, the aspect of nonlocal mind that contains all information past, present, and future.
11 One accesses it, he said, by "becoming it," with a single-pointed focus of attention. His writings provide us with a mental tool kit to accomplish this. Patanjali tells us that in order to see the world in our mind, we must quiet our mental waves (vriti in Sanskrit).12 We have learned to call these waves mental noise. |
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While the Buddhists say that most of our troubles come from making distinctions where in fact there are none, Patanjali taught that, to be in control of our own consciousness, we must learn to make distinctions among our mental states. If we cannot control our own mind, how can we hope to control our interactions with the outside world? He described five states of mental functioning, and made it clear that we should always know which state we are in. He said we must discriminate between right thinking, wrong thinking (errors), sleeping or dreaming, remembering, and imagining.13 These correspond precisely to our concept for learning to separate the psi signal from memory, analysis, and imagination, the principal sources of mental noise we encounter in remote viewing. |
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This model of psi functioning suggests that the information we access is always with us, and therefore always available. It is not a new theory, but it seems to fit the data I've observed better than the "information transmission" model, in which one person sends a psychic message to another. |
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In order to familiarize ourselves with the experience of psi, the authors carried out a series of experimental trials, in preparation for the double-blind study later described in Chapter 5. In one, I had to describe a target that was only shown to me sealed in a cardboard box. I looked at the package, closed my eyes, and clearly saw a star filling the box. The unknown remote-viewing object was in fact a papier-mâché star. I believe that with targets that are archetypes, such as a star, or a doll, we instantly fill in the rest of the picture from memory gestalts. We have come to consider these as "hot" targets, which we almost always describe correctly. Examples of these from recent experience include: an apple corer, eyeglasses, a collapsible silver cup, dolls, stars, shiny things, a Swiss army knife, a magnifying glass, Santa Claus, a Coke bottle, land/water interfaces, and windmills. Our brains are |
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