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spiritual. There is no doubt that psi gives us a unique window on our nonlocal reality. It allows us to have contact with a kind of omniscience that none of our other senses makes available to us. Buddhist teachings would have us believe that psychic powers do, indeed, exist, and can be used for beneficial purposes. However, if a person shows an interest in developing these powers, then he or she is not yet ready to use them. In this tradition, ESP in all its forms is widely regarded as a stumbling block to be overcome on the path to enlightenment. One might well consider that using these abilities to spy on the Russians or to make money in the commodities market is a trivialization of a sacred gift.
We have chosen to discuss the psychic spying described in Chapter 2 as an example of psi functioning, because it illustrates that ESP abilities are available, useful, and abundant. We look forward to the time when different applications of our psychic abilities are studied and developed to a reliable and useful stage.
We often hear that psi is a weak and unreliable faculty. Arthur Koestler, in his pioneering book of 1956, Roots of Coincidence, spoke of the "ink fish phenomenon," wherein psi disappears in a murky cloud whenever you try to get too close to it. 1 This may have been true of available evidence in the 1950s and '60s, but current laboratory data, especially for remote viewing, show that psychic perception is about to take its place alongside other perceptual modalities we know and trust. Now that the U.S. government has declassified some of its highest-quality ESP data, these results should begin to find their way into mainstream scientific inquiry, rather than hovering at the edges of credibility in the tabloid newspapers.
The new perceptual data of remote viewing has aspects in common with recent double-blind clinical studies of remote healing. We now know that although some individuals have a special talent for remote viewing, anyone can learn to do it. Similarly, although shamans and medicine men are given special training to develop their gifts for healing, it appears that all people have the capacity to be healers, to a greater or lesser degree. For example, a mother's cuddling of her sick child lets loose a rush of endorphins and endocrines that can ease the infant's suffering and promote its

 
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