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FOREWORD

In this small book is compressed a world of ideas — a formula for new ways of being. Within a sturdy background of scientific research and years of conclusive studies, it presents a perspective on our humanity that, until now, would have seemed more mythic than real.

Many have long suspected that the very concepts of “near” and “far” may be a stratagem of our local minds — more a habit or a cultural dictum than the way things really are. But now we discover what poets and mystics have always suspected: Our minds are star-gates, our bodies celled of mysteries; what was taken to be remote is actually our near neighbor in the all-reaching compass of the mind.

Russell Targ has spent a lifetime working in the science of consciousness and human possibilities. His research methods are both rigorous and resourceful, as they must be in such pioneering fields. And yet, in elegant and lucid prose, he shows us the other side of the moon of ourselves. The descriptions of the remote viewing work that he and his associates have done are both compelling and central to our understanding of the human capacity.

Russell Targ gives us insight into why we sometimes receive information — about a place, an object, a person — that is neither available through normal, local, sensory mechanisms nor explained by classical space-time theories. Where does this apparently intuitive information come from? Why is it that we sometimes gain knowledge with a rapidity that is more like remembering than like any learning process? In exploring these questions, Dr. Targ is one of the new group of brilliant and courageous scientists who are changing our views of the nature of reality.

In this company, we would include the English biologist Rupert Sheldrake and his theory of “morphic resonance.” Sheldrake states the very basis of paradigm shift: things are as they are because they were as they were. The laws of nature are not absolutes; rather, they are accumulations of habits. The law of gravity, for example, is a pretty well-fixed habit, probably owing to the trillions of beings throughout the universe who give it general assent. Yet yogis, swamis, and more than a few Catholic saints report that, in deep meditation or spiritual rapture, they have been known to bump their heads on the ceiling. Rapture is nothing if not a paradigm shift.

Laws change, habits dissolve, new forms and functions emerge whenever an individual or a society learns a new behavior. This is because we are all connected through what Sheldrake calls “morphogenetic fields” — organizing templates that weave through time and space and hold the patterns for all structures, but which can be altered according to our changing thoughts and actions. Thus the more an event, skill, or pattern of behavior occurs, the more powerful its morphogenetic field becomes. We know, for example, that people in the twentieth century learned to ride bicycles and use machines more quickly and effectively than did people in the nineteenth century. Similarly, today’s children and adolescents learn to use computers in ways that seem beyond the competence of their parents — or, as an adult friend once said when he couldn’t get a computer program to work, “Let’s call in an expert. Get the kid next door.”

Children, some autistic people, idiots savants, people in life-threatening situations, animals who know just when their masters have gotten on the bus to come home — all are participating in this phenomenon. But what is behind it? Recent cutting-edge, state-of-the-art physics now says that it comes from the quantum hologram. In each case I’ve mentioned, the individuals have gone beyond the bandwidth of local perception and memory and entered a field of knowing in which much larger information can be accessed via the quantum hologram. It has been suggested that this quantum hologram is made of a higher light vibration and holds all knowledge and information. It may be that the lower light vibration — the one that falls within the electromagnetic spectrum and therefore guides our perception — decodes the higher vibration of the quantum hologram.

If we look at how holograms are created on film, we may be able to understand by analogy how this decoding operates. To create a hologram, light from a laser goes through a maze of mirrors and beam-splitters to form two beams of light. A beam-splitter is a half-silvered mirror that allows part of the light (the reference beam) to pass through directly to the film while reflecting part of the light (the illuminating beam) toward the object being pictured, from which it is reflected onto the same film. When the two beams meet, the result of the interference patterns between them is recorded on the film. Where the beams coincide, or are “in phase,” there will be enough light to expose the film because the light energy is reinforced at the points of interference. Where the beams are out of phase, they will cancel out each other’s energy and leave a dark place on the film. The picture of the object in this resulting film hologram can be seen when laser, or coherent, light decodes it and gives us the picture.

Now amplify this to a universal scale and think of the film as the nonlocal simultaneous-everywhere-and-everything matrix — the quantum hologram itself. It is not a film but a great field of being — the order of the metaverse. Alfred North Whitehead, in 1929, described this field as the great expanding nexus of occurrences beyond sense perception, with all minds and all things interlocking. More recently, physicist David Bohm referred to it as the primary order of the universe, which is implicate, enfolded, harboring our reality in much the same way as the DNA in the nucleus of a cell harbors potential life and directs its unfolding.

So the quantum hologram is an order of pure beingness, pure frequency — perhaps the essential Light itself — which transcends all specifications and knows neither “here” nor “there.” It is the place from which patterns and archetypes arise. It is the realm of love and organicity, the lure of evolution, and the Mind that is minding. It is the realm from which the forms of reality are engendered, pervading everything, and potentially totally available at any particular part of our reality.

The secondary order is the decoded hologramatic image of reality, or what Bohm calls “second-generation reality.” All apparent movement and substance, then, are of this secondary order — that which is explicate, unfolded, manifest in space and time, filled with kittens and quasars and the need to connect with others. Thus, the greater part of our awareness is caught up in Bohm’s second-generation reality, while the eternal part of our consciousness is forever contained in the primary, implicate order, or quantum hologram. We all have it in us to travel back and forth between the two orders, for our brains seem to serve both as gates into God and as hologramatic reducing valves that render God-stuff into structure and form.

This is where Russell Targ’s work becomes relevant to all of us. It is about training human reality to be very fluid, moving back and forth between ordinary and extraordinary realities, local and archetypal worlds, implicate and explicate domains.

Most, if not all, of the subtle, ephemeral, and unexplained phenomena associated with subjective experience are probably connected, directly or indirectly, with the nonlocal nature of the quantum hologram. These phenomena run the gamut from telepathy to mystical experience. In this regard, what we call “psychic phenomena” are only by-products of this simultaneous-everywhere matrix. And synchronicity — those coincidental occurrences that seem to reflect some higher design or connectedness — would seem to derive from the purposeful, patterning nature of the primary order, wherein everything is interconnected regardless of how distant in space or time. In fact, there is no such thing as coincidence in the usual sense, for everything is coinciding; thus the remarkable results that Targ and his team have been able to elicit. What this book demonstrates is that the phenomena that have hitherto seemed extraordinary are really just a fascinating subset of reality in general. The brain, then, can be described in part as a quantum computer. Consciousness emerges from quantum processes in the brain — that is, from the interreaction between your perception on the electromagnetic spectrum and the quantum, more ultimate spectrum of light. Targ’s research not only implies what quantum physics affirms — the fundamental transformation of the scientific worldview — it also demonstrates the quantum aspects inherent in our human nature. This has tremendous implications for philosophy, psychology, and metaphysics.

Think of local consciousness on the electromagnetic spectrum of light as the foreground and quantum mind as the background. Since it is rare that most of us attend to the background, or non-local, during the course of our everyday affairs, we perceive things without the subtle awareness that would bring the full grandeur of reality into play. And yet, as Targ shows so effectively, we all have these capacities for enlarged perception, although they have been stunted by habit, conditioning, and the cultural trance. With the kinds of training offered by Targ and other disciplines related to non-ordinary states of consciousness, it is possible that many individuals can learn to use their mind-brain systems in ways that open the doors of their perceptions to receive the news from the universe. It is likely that Einstein and others who testified to making huge creative leaps, then spending years finding the steps that would lead to their conclusions, were actually accessing quantum information rather than extrapolating from factual data.

Given our quantum hologram essence, our minds may well be omni-dimensional. I believe that consciousness has the innate capacity to tune into and modulate with different domains. This implies that we have, within these resonant quantum fields of consciousness, access to different universes. Does this also mean that the mind has the ability to travel in time, to visit ancient Palestine when Christ delivered the Sermon on the Mount, to be present in consciousness at the signing of the Declaration of Independence? Is the past still present, nested in the many frequencies that make up the quantum mind of the Maker?

What seems to be true is that, by changing consciousness, we can experience more profound patterns of the universe. I find, for example, that when we alter awareness toward more meditative or spiritual states, we become citizens of a larger universe in regard to perception, time, space, dimensionality, and possibility; we operate at higher frequencies within the electromagnetic spectrum of the light domain. This is because we are operating from the higher patterns themselves — what I am calling the archetypal domain. It is then, too, that our psychological makeup is less traumatized by past experience, is more capacious and capricious, and we feel extended into a multidimensional universe.

Thus, among many other things, we are able to cause action at a distance. There have been millennia of observations of such phenomena. If prayer had not produced some positive results, religion would have been abandoned centuries ago. Ascribing such results to a supernatural agency rather than to nonlocality simply represents a different mode of description. Look at all the work that has been done in recent years to document the efficacy of prayer, particularly healing prayer. The results in most cases are very suggestive of nonlocal effects.

Limitless Mind invites the reader to dwell in possibility. Russell Targ and his associates, especially his beloved daughter Elisabeth, bring certainty to what until recently was considered merely anecdotal. In so doing, they give us a universe that is larger than our aspirations and richer than all our dreams. For this we are very grateful.

Jean Houston