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AUTHOR’S PREFACE

I consider science an integrating part of our endeavor to answer the one great philosophical question which embraces all others — who are we? And more than that: I consider this not only one of the tasks, but the task, of science, the only one that really counts.

— Erwin Schrödinger

Science and Humanism

I have been investigating and writing about remote viewing and extrasensory perception (ESP) for more than thirty years. In this book, I will try to answer the critical question, “Why bother with ESP?”

In an author’s preface, the reader often has an opportunity to find out who the author is and what is on his mind. My mind is presently filled with a mixture of anger, grief, and sadness at the recent and untimely death of my dear daughter Elisabeth, who left us in July of 2002 at the age of forty. She was an openhearted psychiatrist, a courageous researcher, a linguist, and a healer who often worked with me. Although she was a practicing Buddhist with a Jewish upbringing, from her sickbed she expressed the desire to be “the Virgin Mary’s assistant” — very much in line with her research in distant healing and distant prayer. I have included more about Elisabeth’s research and our father-daughter ESP experiments and adventures in the Afterword.

Elisabeth was an inspiration to many people within and beyond the medical research community. She also brightened my life and inspired me to write this book. I would not have been introduced to the possibilities of limitless mind if Elisabeth and her husband, physicist Mark Comings, had not been so passionate about the Dzogchen (great perfection) teachings of the twelfth-century Buddhist master Longchenpa.¹ In his books I experienced the magic of trading the fear and suffering of our contemporary conditioned awareness for the peace and freedom of timeless existence. As the visionary philosopher Gurdjieff describes our condition, we are each like “a machine controlled by accidental shocks from outside.” This is what we must overcome.

As a scientist, I am comfortable saying that Dzogchen teaches us to look directly at our awareness and experience the geometry of consciousness — the relationship of our awareness to the space-time in which we live. Properly understood, these teachings of expanded awareness and the experience of spaciousness are not about self improvement or gaining power; they are about selfrealization: discovering who we really are. Such teaching predates by more than eight centuries my own efforts for the past decade to show people how to develop their psychic abilities. To my mind, the self or ego is not who we are. This can be revealed in many ways, one of them being the practice of remote viewing. Among other things, we discover through this process that we are the flow of loving awareness that is available to us whenever we are quiet and peaceful. This is the underlying theme of Limitless Mind.

I believe that, in this plane of illusion, we give life all the meaning it has for us. We give meaning to everything we experience based on our lifelong conditioning. As it is articulated in The Tibetan Book of the Dead,² “As a thing is viewed, so it appears.” It appears to me that we are, first and foremost, looking for the experience of love. In a meditative state of mind, we can become aware that we are not a body, but rather limitless, nonlocal awareness animating or residing as a body. Resting in the spacious flow of loving awareness — which some call God — we discover that we already have, right now within us, everything we could possibly be looking for. This is what the Hindus call ananda, and what Jesus called “the peace that passeth understanding.” Our needs and wants are the illusions. The spiritual path called A Course in Miracles teaches: “I am not a body. I am free... as God created me.”³ In Limitless Mind, I will demonstrate that this is a testable hypothesis that does not require belief in anything.

The data from remote viewing research show, without a doubt, that our mind is limitless and that our awareness both fills and transcends our ordinary understanding of space and time. Psychic abilities, and remote viewing in particular, point to the possibility of our residing in — and as — this state of expanded, timeless, fearless, spacious awareness. Psychic abilities are neither sacred nor secular; they are just natural human abilities. We can use them to find lost car keys or elusive parking spaces, to forecast changes in the stock market, or to discover who we really are. I believe that 99 percent of the value of psychic abilities resides in the opportunity they offer for self-inquiry and self-realization. Let’s see if we can accomplish this together.

Russell Targ

Palo Alto, California

August 4, 2002

(Elisabeth Targ’s forty-first birthday)