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INTRODUCTION

the unknowable

end of the science

Most people have the ability to describe and experience events and locations that are blocked from ordinary perception. Limitless Mind illustrates this perceptual ability by presenting decades of experiments in remote viewing, or remote perception of events. Such abilities have been demonstrated and documented in numerous U.S. and international laboratories, including the laboratory of Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in California, where a program of investigation began thirty years ago. However, despite repeated corroboration of our natural capacity for such psychic abilities, mainstream science has not accepted these abilities as real. How can this be?

As one of the scientists who conducted the research at SRI, I do not have to believe in ESP. For decades, I have seen ESP occur in the laboratory on a day-to-day basis. As a physicist, I don’t have to believe in this phenomenon any more than I have to believe in the existence of lasers — with which I have also worked extensively. Psychic abilities exist, just as lasers do, as has been repeatedly demonstrated by hundreds of experimental research studies. What I believe in is good scientific data and replicated experiments, and those are what I describe in this book.

There is a skeptical community that works tirelessly to “save” science from the depredations of frauds and charlatans. I applaud them, and I think they play a valuable role. In science, however, it is just as serious an error to ignore real but unpredictable data as it is to accept false data as true. For example, neglecting a small, fluctuating signal from an air turbulence detector can cause an airplane to crash — something that has actually happened.

Naturally, none of us want to appear gullible, silly, or insane. We would often prefer to be wrong with the support of a group than to be correct all by ourselves. Offering scientific opinions contrary to the prevailing paradigm puts one in a similar position to such currently respected men as Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei, who suffered in their day for offering correct but unpopular scientific opinions about the earth’s motion. Commenting on this hazard, Voltaire wrote, “It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.”

Similarly, many people today are reluctant to acknowledge the reality of psychic abilities, even though a 2001 Gallup poll stated that more than half the U.S. population reports having had psychic experiences. These believers include two-thirds of the college graduates and university professors queried. Such experiences, however, are strongly repressed in this society. Mainstream scientists usually declare them to be without credibility, and many organized religions declare them to be bad, or even evil.

For millennia, philosophers have invited us to discover who we really are and what abilities we actually have, but we often feel afraid to do so because such exploration can be dangerous. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo were persecuted because they showed overwhelming evidence that we were not, in fact, special beings at the center of the universe, as everyone had been taught. Instead, we were (and are) inhabitants of one of several large rocks a hundred million miles from the sun, at the edge of the galaxy. People have always hated this idea. It was an attack on their egos — on who they thought they were. In the nineteenth century, when Charles Darwin demonstrated that we are also first cousins to monkeys and chimpanzees, it was a further assault on our pride!

Another blow to our egos came not much later, when Sigmund Freud showed that much of what we believe and experience is governed by our subconscious, of which we are entirely unaware. The experience of psychic abilities further erodes the boundaries of the self by indicating that the psychic shell separating us from each other is really quite porous.

In actuality, modern physics shows that our consciousness connects us quite intimately. Nobel physicist Erwin Schrödinger described our profound interconnectedness this way:

Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown. There is only one thing, and that which seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception, the Indian maya, as in a gallery of mirrors.¹

Such realizations of one consciousness can give rise to a fear of uncontrolled, telepathic intimacy, and a possibly troubling loss of privacy. As our personal egos are diminished by advances in scientific knowledge, however, our concept of who we are is greatly enhanced. As we learn to surrender more and more of our attachment to our egos, we can participate in the most profound intimacy without fear of losing ourselves. We can share the energetic flow of loving awareness with others and expand our knowledge of who we really are. Intimacy is not to be feared; it is to be celebrated. What we discover from the data of “psi,” or psychical research, is that we are capable of expanded awareness far beyond our physical bodies.

In fact, the principle finding of this research demonstrates that there is no known spatial or temporal limit to our awareness. That is to say, in consciousness there is only one of us here. Or, as the Buddhists and quantum physicists continuously remind us, “Separation is an illusion.”

NO END TO SCIENCE IN SIGHT

We often hear that the end of physics is just a few years away — to be described, as Michio Kaku recently said, “with an equation less than one inch long.”² Similarly, Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg recently published a long essay in the New York Review of Books describing his “search for the fundamental principles that underlie everything.”³ He added, however, that “science in the future may take a turn that we cannot now imagine. But, I see not the slightest advance sign of such a change” (my emphasis).

Scientists have been saying this sort of thing for more than a century. For example, in the late 1800s Lord Kelvin made the now-famous statement that physics was complete, except that “only two small clouds remain on the horizon of the knowledge of physics.” The two clouds were: first, the interpretation of the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment (which did not detect any effects of the widely hypothesized “aether”), and second, the failure of then-contemporary electromagnetic theory to predict spectral distribution of black-body radiation. These little clouds led to the discovery of special relativity, quantum mechanics, and what we think of today as modern physics.

In 1975, at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, the same Steven Weinberg declared, “What we want to know is the set of simple principles from which the properties of particles, and hence everything else, can be deduced.” Then, at Cambridge University in 1980, revered astrophysicist Stephen Hawking told his audience, “I want to discuss the possibility that the goal of theoretical physics might be achieved in the not-too-distant future, say, by the end of the twentieth century. By this I mean that we might have a complete, consistent, and unified theory of physical interactions that would describe all possible observations.” Not only did this not happen, but I posit that it is unlikely to happen. As I write this, physicists are still struggling to explain newly discovered dark matter, dark energy, and the very surprising accelerating expansion of the universe (or, is it a change in the supposedly constant velocity of light?).

To my mind, the most shocking example of a brilliant man saying something truly silly is a quote from A. A. Michelson, after he showed that there was no aether, but before the discovery of relativity and quantum mechanics. Expressing the spirit of his time, he said, ”The most important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplemented in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.”⁴

I believe that these “end of physics” statements are not only untrue, but misleading and logically impossible. The hubris of brilliant and famous scientists is still with us today. The issue is very important, because it shows what terrible trouble we can get into if we are totally lacking in awe, wonder, or spiritual questioning.

Great visionary scientists such as Einstein, Newton, and John Archibald Wheeler had no such lack. At ninety, Wheeler was still asking, “How come the universe?” In his writing, Einstein said that we “use our intellect to solve difficult problems, but the problems themselves come from another source.”

We may well ask: Will there be an end to mathematics? To biology? To history? Will the human mind withdraw from science? Does curiosity ever achieve completion? I think not. A thousand years from now, our current views of physics will seem as primitive as the phlogiston theory seems to us today. (In the eighteenth century, phlogiston was believed to be an element that caused combustion or was given off by anything burning; the notion has long since been discarded.)

Ancient spiritual and philosophical teachings with their roots in India and Tibet assert that consciousness has existed since the beginning of time. However, this consciousness has been unrecognized because of our ignorance of our own true nature. This seemingly radical idea of nonlocal connections is finding increasing acceptance in the data of modern physics, of all places. Thus, it seems appropriate to begin Chapter 1 by discussing the ways in which contemporary physics shows that there are “nonlocal” connections called quantum interconnectedness — that is, an instantaneous spanning of space and time. In Chapter 1, I also relate these data to similar ideas from Buddhism and other ancient mystical teachings, all of which claim that “separation is an illusion.”

Remote viewing is an example of nonlocal ability. It has repeatedly allowed people to describe, draw, and experience objects and activities anywhere on the planet, contemporaneously or in the near future.⁵ Although we do not yet know how this works, there should no longer be any doubt that most of us are capable of experiencing places and events that appear to be separated from our physical bodies by space and time. In Chapter 2, I present the evidence from remote viewing experiments — my own as well as my colleagues’ — showing the reality of these psychic abilities. Then, in Chapter 3, I describe how you can discover these abilities in yourself and incorporate them into your life, including detailed exercises from our remote viewing workshops. The practice of remote viewing may reveal more to you than simply what’s in a paper bag in the other room; it may reveal the nature of your limitless mind — who you really are.

I explore precognition in Chapter 4, including what I consider to be the most important scientific fact from psychical research: It is no more difficult to describe an event that is to occur in the future than to describe an event occurring at the present moment — casting into doubt our understanding of causality itself.

Chapter 5 describes the data and techniques that people use to intuitively diagnose illness. Psychic diagnosis goes beyond the doctor who can make a correct “snap” decision as soon as she sees the patient; here we describe the ability to diagnose illnesses without ever seeing the patient! In Chapter 6, I present the most recent research data on the efficacy of distant prayer and distant healing (categorized as “Distant Mental Influence of Living Systems,” or DMILS). Whereas Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 deal with the inflow of information from the world, Chapter 6 examines the outflow of healing intention.

Finally, in Chapter 7 I talk about the relationship between remote viewing and spirituality, and how such understanding can fill us with love and free us from fear. I describe the practice of self-inquiry as a way to move beyond our thoughts, out of conditioned awareness, and into a more spacious, peaceful way of life. I have often said that in my past work I was a psychic spy for the CIA and found God — just one of those so-called unintended consequences. (Our program at SRI provided valuable information to almost every branch of the U.S. intelligence community during the Cold War with the Soviet Union.) In this last chapter, I share my experience of how this research led me to philosophical and spiritual teachings that have transformed my consciousness and changed my life in unexpected and rewarding ways.

Limitless

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