Nonlocal Knowing: The Emerging View of Who We Are

Operation Deep Quest 

One of the most remarkable individuals I know is Stephan A. Schwartz, with whom I have the pleasure of working at EXPLORE. He is the author of many books, most recently Opening to the Infinite.9 Schwartz is a real-life Indiana Jones. He has had many successful careers as a writer, photographer, scientist, researcher, television and film producer, adventurer, explorer, sailor-soldier, anthropologist, historian, citizen-diplomat, futurist, and philosopher. He has written for the major newspapers and magazines of our day. His research and adventures have taken him to the farthest corners of the planet. He has written speeches for a variety of senior political figures, from the President to the Chief of Naval Operations. He is a former editorial staffer of National Geographic and former associate editor of Sea Power. His online Schwartzreport analyzes trends that will affect our future (www.schwartzreport.net).

While serving as Special Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations, Stephan was a key member of the team that changed the American military from an elitist conscription institution to an all-volunteer meritocracy following Vietnam. Strongly dedicated to social change, he served as a member of the board of the Soviet-American Exchange Program (now The Russian American Center) begun by California’s Esalen Institute, which launched groundbreaking citizen-diplomacy efforts.

Schwartz’s passion is exploring how consciousness operates in the world. He is perhaps best known for his role in developing remote viewing. Remote viewing refers to the efforts of individuals to perceive distant people, places, events, and objects, usually in the context of an experiment. The term and basic techniques were introduced by physicists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff in 1974, while working at SRI International (formerly known as Stanford Research Institute)10 with artist Ingo Swann. The remote viewing process was subsequently refined by other researchers, including Schwartz.

Schwartz has used remote viewing for almost 20 years to locate and reconstruct archaeological sites around the world. He has been involved in numerous expeditions, including one to Grand Bahamas Bank to find the location of the brig Leander; to Jamaica with the Institute for Nautical Archaeology to survey St. Anne’s Bay and locate the site of Columbus’ sunken caravel from his fourth and last voyage; and to Alexandria, Egypt, which resulted in the first modern mapping of the Eastern Harbor of Alexandria and the discovery of numerous shipwrecks. The Egyptian venture resulted as well in the discovery of Mark Anthony’s palace in Alexandria, the Ptolemaic Palace Complex of Cleopatra, and the remains of the Lighthouse of Pharos, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

Schwartz was fascinated by the early work in remote viewing. How could ordinary individuals know things remotely in space and time? How could they have premonitions of future events, or describe remote sites he or she had never seen or heard of?

Most people who encounter this field for the first time imagine that some sort of signal must pass between the “receiver” and the distant site, like the electromagnetic signals involved in radio and television transmissions. But when Schwartz reviewed the scientific experiments that were on the books, he found no evidence for the passage of any kind of electromagnetic signal. For one thing, distance was not a factor in these events; if an electromagnetic signal were involved, one would expect it to get weaker with increasing distance, meaning that the strength and accuracy of remote viewing should diminish with increasing distance between the remote viewer and the site or event he or she was attempting to access. The data showed that this was not the case; distance didn’t matter. Moreover, remote viewing could not be blocked, even when the viewer was placed in mineshafts, caves, or Faraday cages, which are metal boxes that block most types of electromagnetic signals. All told, it appeared that nothing physical was transmitted or received in remote viewing.

There was one possible exception: extremely low-frequency (ELF) electromagnetic waves. These are very long waveforms, on the order of miles, as opposed to the short, high-frequency waves seen in radio or television transmission. Extremely low-frequency waves have strong penetrating power and can pass through physical barriers. Deep sea water provides one of the few surefire shields against their passage.

Could the transmission of ELF waves explain remote viewing? One way of answering the question was to conduct a remote viewing experiment with the viewer deep under the ocean’s surface. If the experiment succeeded, this would be strong evidence that ELF waves were not involved in the process, because they would be blocked by seawater beyond a certain depth.

Schwartz had previously served at the highest echelons of the United States Navy, and he knew the movers and shakers in the naval hierarchy. In 1977, he gained access for three days to a small United States Navy submarine, the Taurus, that would be undergoing sea trials near Santa Catalina Island, off the coast of Southern California.

By this time, Navy researchers had discovered the depth to which ELF waves penetrate seawater. So, if remote viewers in the sub could successfully describe persons, places, or events on the surface while below the penetrating level of ELF and higher-frequency electromagnetic waves, then the mechanism for remote viewing could not involve the transmission of electromagnetic signals. “And I thought,” Schwartz says, “as long as I’m doing that, I’ll also see if it is possible for remote viewers to locate a previously unknown wreck on the sea floor.”11

The experiment, which became known as Deep Quest, took place in the summer of 1977 off the Southern California coast in the waters surrounding Santa Catalina Island. Stanford Research Institute physicists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff took part, as well as nuclear physicist Edwin May.

Schwartz gave nautical charts of the area to two remote viewers—New York City artist Ingo Swann and California photographer Hella Hamid. At the time, Swann and Hamid were regarded by many as the two most successful psychics in the United States. Schwartz asked them to mark the charts with the location of the unknown wreck and to describe what would be found at the location. The two remote viewers sent back their charts marked with the locations of several sunken wrecks, many of which were verified as correct by the Bureau of Marine Sites of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. There was one site, however, marked by both Swann and Hamid, for which the Bureau had no record. Not only did both the remote viewers independently indicate this same site on their nautical charts, but they also described it in the same way—a sailing ship that had a small steam engine on the deck. They indicated that the ship’s steam engine had caught fire around 90 years before, causing the ship to sink. The searchers would find the aft helm of the ship lying with the wheel down and the shaft coming out of it, they said, with a steam winch nearby. They drew pictures of these things. In addition, Hamid indicated that they would find a block of granite at the site, measuring about 5 × 6 × 7 feet.

On the first day of the experiment, Schwartz assigned Swann and Hamid, the two remote viewers, to the submarine and asked them to describe where physicists Puthoff and Targ were hiding in the Palo Alto area, far up the California coast. One of the remote viewers indicated they were hiding in a huge tree and that they were climbing the tree. That’s exactly what the physicists were doing at the time.

Then the submarine descended to a level below the ELF threshold for penetrating seawater. By this time, Puthoff and Targ had changed their location. One of the remote viewers identified the new location as “they’re hiding in a shopping mall. There are big glass windows and there are people all around. There’s red tile on the floor. There’s this big turning wheel.” The perception was again correct. These hits seemed to rule out the possibility that any kind of electromagnetic signal was being exchanged between the surface targets and the remote viewers in the submarine.

The next day, a surface ship dropped a radio homing device at the point where the remote viewers said the sunken ship would be to guide the sub to the precise site. This was in an area where the submarine crew had already been diving for weeks, well before Schwartz and his team arrived in the area. “We have been all over this area and there’s nothing there, nothing remotely like what you’re describing,” the sub crew cautioned. Then the sub’s radio device starting pinging, and there it was, just as the remote viewers had described—the big block of stone, the steam winch, the aft helm with the wheel down and the shaft pointing up. “I think everybody,” Schwartz said in an understatement, “including me, and certainly the … submarine crew, and the guys at the Institute for Marine and Coastal Studies [of the University of Southern California], everyone was kind of stunned by this.” Schwartz filmed everything and made a movie of the event, called Psychic Sea Hunt.12

Knowing that skeptics would try to debunk the experiment, Schwartz had invited senior scientist Anne Kale, a renowned space expert and head of the Earth Applications Satellite Research Group of the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, to come along and witness everything, start to finish, and to hold and control all the records of the experiment. “I wanted to be certain,” Schwartz said, “that we had a clear, unimpeachable chronology of when they [the remote viewers] made the predictions, what the predictions were, and what was discovered on the site.” The goal was to close all the loopholes and rule out alternative explanations, so that if the experiment succeeded, the likeliest explanation would be the operation of a remote kind of knowing on the part of Swann and Hamid.

Could fraud have been involved? It isn’t likely that Schwartz could have known where the wreck was located, when it was not even on the nautical charts of the Bureau of Marine Sites. Could Schwartz and his team have “salted” the site, depositing the sunken ship parts and relics ahead of time, then saying “look here”? There is no evidence for this possibility, and a lot of evidence against it. This would have been a huge undertaking that would have attracted a lot of attention. Moreover, when the submersible Taurus arrived at the site, the wreck was not discernible as such, being nothing more than a vague shadow on the ocean floor. The wreck was covered with decades of sand, silt, and barnacles. Marine organisms grow at a known rate; thus, the fact that they were more than an inch thick on several artifacts showed they had been underwater for several decades. This would not have been the appearance of debris that had recently been deposited there.

Moreover, seaweed gradually grows over and around sunken objects on the ocean floor. The fact that the seaweed lattice on the sunken ship’s parts was intact was unimpeachable evidence that they had lain undisturbed for years and had neither been deposited there recently nor tampered with.

Schwartz relates how he was attacked at a dinner party by a skeptic following the discovery, who said, “How do you know they didn’t find those things somewhere and just dump them overboard, then go back and mark your chart?” “It is the seaweed,” Schwartz says, “that [brought] him to a sputtering silence.”9(pp18-201)

Several other Deep Quest experts defended the discovery against skeptical charges. Don Walsh, then dean of the Institute for Marine and Coastal Studies of the University of California, and who had made the deepest dive in a submersible, said in a TV documentary, “We know submersibles. We know deep ocean engineering. They [Schwartz and the remote viewing team] would have had to beat us across the board. I’m just saying that this didn’t happen by chance.”13

Neither could Schwartz’s team have obtained the location in advance, for the plain fact that it was not known. Thomas Cooke, marine sites expert for the Bureau of Land Management, the government agency that keeps track of marine wrecks, said, “Based on intensive study of the sites in southern California waters, I must conclude that the area selected by Schwartz’s psychics was previously unknown and could not have been found by going through old papers, books at the library, or that sort of thing. . . . There are 1653 known wrecks along the Southern California Coast; [the one they found is not] one of them.”14

Could the discovery have been a lucky hit, just “one of those things” that sometimes happens against great odds? “The target area equaled a rectangle 80 × 108 meters,” says Schwartz. “It was located in a search area that was 3900 square kilometers. That meant if the search area was overlain with a grid made up of rectangles the same size as the target area, there would be 451,389 equal-sized rectangles in the grid. . . . What is the chance of locating the one correct grid box out of 451,389 similar boxes? It turns out to be very improbable to do this by chance.”9(pp198,199)

Schwartz and his team had apparently closed all the loopholes, just as they had set out to do. To this day, however, dissenters still insist that chicanery is the best explanation for this astonishing experiment. Schwartz no longer wastes time with them. He believes that if they are not convinced by Deep Quest that distant knowing is real, it is unlikely that they would be convinced by any evidence. “Some skeptics are so certain that no paranormal event could happen that they will postulate fraud even when the only specifiable basis for suspecting fraud is their belief that paranormal events are impossible,” says Donald Evans, professor of philosophy at Victoria College, University of Toronto. “Such a stance is not prudence, it is paranoia fed by fanaticism.”15

Anyone wishing to explore Deep Quest further can do so in the wealth of information available on Schwartz’s Web site: http://www.stephanaschwartz.com.

Deep Quest was one of 12 archeological projects that relied on remote viewers to locate lost or hidden sites. In his book The Secret Vaults of Time,16 Schwartz discusses how archeologists for a hundred years have used psychic methods to aid their discoveries. In his book The Alexandria Project,17 he discusses one of his projects in detail, his exploration of Alexandria harbor in Egypt.

“What we’ve learned,” Schwartz says, “is that it’s as easy to see something … far as something … near. Distance doesn’t make any difference. It is as easy to see something that happens tomorrow as it is to see something that happens today.”

Presentiment: Nonlocal Knowing in Time 

Most people consider Operation Deep Quest as a demonstration that people can know things remotely in space, at a distance. When we look closely, however, we can see that these events have a temporal aspect to them. Something rather like premonitions seemed to be operating. The individuals who were involved were essentially saying, “When you search here in the future, this is what you will find.” They were looking ahead in time, sampling the future, making predictions. Their intuition not only transcended space, but time as well.

I’ve found that people can accept distant knowing in space much more easily than in time. Gaining information at a distance is one thing; that we might know the future is much more problematic for most persons. Those who feel this way may simply have to, in the vernacular, get over it.

The reason is evidence. Data is now pouring in from around the world that humans have a sense that researcher-author Dean Radin, of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, calls presentiment, which literally means “an emotion or feeling that comes before.”18 In brief, Radin and others have conducted numerous experiments in which sexually explicit, violent, or soothing images are shown to subjects in a random sequence determined by a computer. People begin reacting physiologically to the sexual or violent images before they are shown on the computer and before it even selects them.

Kary Mullis, a Nobel Prize–winning chemist, became fascinated with Radin’s findings and decided to give the experiment a try. “It’s spooky,” he said, “I could see about three seconds into the future. You shouldn’t be able to do that.”19 Dick Bierman, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, who has replicated Radin’s work, says, “We’re satisfied that people can sense the future before it happens. We’d now like to move on and see what kind of person is particularly good at it.”20 Brian Josephson, a Nobel physicist at Cambridge University, says of these findings, “So far, the evidence seems compelling. What seems to be happening is that information is coming from the future. In fact, it’s not clear in physics why you can’t see the future. In physics, you certainly cannot completely rule out this effect.”21 Josephson is referring to the fact that the basic formulas that describe the physical world seem to work equally well forward or backward in time.

The presentiment experiments are only one thread in the tapestry of experiments documenting nonlocal knowing. The largest database in the world illustrating these human abilities is that of PEAR, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory; PEAR closed recently, having completed its research agenda. Yet, for more than a quarter of a century, PEAR researchers pursued an array of experiments in which subjects either acquired information nonlocally from, or inserted information nonlocally into, the environment, often at global distances.22 Many of the experiments demonstrate profound time displacement. For example, in the majority of the PEAR remote viewing tests, the subjects perceived the computer-selected information several days before it was mentally conveyed to them by a distant sender and before it was even selected by the computer. The PEAR research program was the subject of a special issue of Explore in May 2007.23

First Sight 

The ability to perceive things nonlocally—beyond the senses, in the future or at a distance—has long been called second sight. This suggests that nonlocal knowing is of secondary importance, a kind of backup to normal vision.

Psychologist and consciousness researcher James C. Carpenter, of the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina, believes the term second sight is misleading. In two seminal papers published in 2004, Carpenter proposed calling nonlocal knowing not second sight but first sight—an innate ability that everyone has.24, 25

First sight can be crudely thought of as psychic antennae or mental radar that sweeps our world in both space and time. First sight provides us with information that we use every moment of our existence. As Carptenter puts it, “[A]t the outermost edge of all of our pressing forward, we use psi processes, which is to say, we make use of the fact that we exist always a little beyond ourselves in space and ahead of ourselves in time. Actually, we can make use of bigger spans ahead and beyond if that meets our needs, but ordinarily a little ahead and beyond is most useful for us.”26

Jessica Utts, a prominent University of California, Davis, statistician who has worked on paranormal research projects for the U.S. military and the CIA, agrees. She suggests that we are constantly sampling the future unconsciously and using the information to help us make better decisions.19

The reason nonlocal knowing or first sight should concern us in the healing professions is because we employ it frequently and because it often surfaces in the course of illness.27, 28

Snap Diagnosis 

I have long been fascinated by the ability of certain physicians to make medical diagnoses with minimal information. During my medical school days, I had a couple of professors who were amazingly skilled at this. When we students would ask them how they arrived at a diagnosis, they would often reassure us that it was merely a matter of “experience” or of just “putting the pieces of the puzzle together.” These explanations didn’t satisfy. We could not follow the logic involved because there was no logic.

Intuitive diagnosis is a term that has arisen to describe this process and is the subject of books by Norman Shealy and Carolyn Myss,29 psychiatrist Judith Orloff, MD,30 and biochemist-psychiatrist Mona Lisa Schulz, PhD, MD.31

Something similar to this phenomenon erupted during the early 19th century in the best medical schools of England and Europe in a practice called snap diagnosis.32 The trick was to “see” what was wrong with the patient and to rattle off a diagnosis as fast as possible, with a minimum of clues and sometimes with no information about the patient at all. Eminent physicians vied with one another in this endeavor, often displaying considerable showmanship. One of the best snap diagnosticians was Napoleon’s favorite doctor, Jean-Nicolas Corvisart, who made contributions to the art of physical diagnosis and the understanding of heart disease. Corvisart once added to his reputation by merely looking at the subject of an oil painting and correctly diagnosing him as suffering from cardiac disease. Hans van Hebra and Joseph Bell, other well-known physicians of the day, could discern not only the diseases of their patients but their occupations as well. The famous German physician Friedrich Theodor von Frerichs was so infatuated with his powers of snap diagnosis that he never admitted a diagnosis to be wrong. Frerichs could be theatrical, and he was worshiped by his students, who, it is said, “hung on his lips, and … revered his wonderful precision.”

Snap diagnosis was not new. Shamans, visionaries, and folk healers had done it for centuries. But that snap diagnosis should crop up in the greatest medical schools of 19th-century Europe and England, when medicine was becoming increasingly scientific, seems decidedly odd.

How valid was this colorful custom? It is difficult to know, because no studies were done to assess the accuracy of the snap diagnosticians. My hunch, however, is that the ability to know things intuitively is a latent, widespread ability in healing circles.

Dreams 

Surveys suggest that the most prevalent way we acquire information nonlocally is in dreams.33

One morning at the Dallas Diagnostic Association, where I practiced internal medicine, a long-time patient of mine arrived unannounced at my office. She was an intelligent, middle-aged woman who was highly successful in her profession. She was distraught and near tears. Without wasting time on formalities, she got to the point.

“I need your help,” she said. “Last night I had a dream in which I saw three little white spots on my left ovary. I’m terrified I have ovarian cancer.”

That was all there was to it—no symptoms, just a disturbing dream. Because of some unsettling health-related dreams of my own that proved to be eerily prophetic,6(pp1-3) I was intrigued by her report. Although her exam proved normal, she was not consoled.

“The dream was one of the most vivid I’ve ever had,” she said. “I can’t dismiss it. I know something is wrong.”

“Let’s do a sonogram and get a picture of your ovaries,” I suggested. She eagerly agreed.

I escorted her down the hall to the Radiology Department and introduced her to the radiologist, a no-nonsense colleague whose technical skills were superb. When he asked her what her problem was, she described her dream without hesitation—three little white spots on her left ovary. The radiologist was not exactly enchanted by this clinical tidbit, and he gave me his best you’ve-got-to-be-kidding glance. It was the first procedure he’d ever performed because of a dream. I left them alone and walked back to my office to see other patients.

Within an hour, the radiologist was in my office. He was nervous and looked pale, as if he’d seen a ghost.

“What on earth is wrong?” I asked. “What did you find?”

“Three little white spots,” he stammered. “On her left ovary.”

“Cancer?”

“No. Ovarian cysts, completely benign.”

“Just like she saw in her dream?” I asked, rubbing it in.

“Yeah,” he conceded. “Just like in her dream.”

People are not supposed to be able to acquire detailed information about organs buried deep within the body. That’s what physical exams and tests are for. So was this woman’s dream a fluke, a lucky guess? On the contrary, I suggest that her dream represents the ability of consciousness to bypass our normal senses and function remotely—nonlocally—in space and time, in ways that are health relevant. Her unconscious mind accessed this information during sleep, brought it back to waking awareness, and allowed her to make a decision that could have had profound consequences for her survival.

From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, this skill makes perfect sense. This is just the sort of ability that an intelligent, survival-oriented organism might sooner or later develop—an early-warning process capable of informing it of threatening events lying beyond the reach of the physical senses. Any organism possessing such an ability could scan the event horizon, assess impending dangers, and take appropriate measures. Such an organism would have a distinct advantage in the high-stakes game of survival of the fittest. This suggests that such a skill might become internalized as part of one’s genetic endowment and would be passed on to succeeding generations.

Note that this woman’s interpretation of the information she acquired in her dream was not completely accurate. She suspected that the ovarian abnormalities meant cancer, when in fact they were benign cysts. Her waking mind exaggerated the danger. This is quite common; dreams of impending dangers are often misinterpreted. When this happens, dreams function like a diagnostic test whose sensitivity is too high, causing it to generate false positives. Now, from a survival perspective, false positives are much better than false negatives, which occur when a dream or a test is too insensitive. If we want to survive, an occasional false alarm is better than no warnings at all. After all, it’s the lion in the bush we don’t see that kills us.

Yet there are unhealthy extremes. In some people, this early warning system may be pathologically sensitive—for instance, in paranoid people who see danger lurking everywhere, all the time.

A challenge facing any creature with such a warning system would be how to distinguish the false alarms from the accurate ones. People I’ve known who are good at reading their dreams say that valid dreams have qualities that set them apart from bogus ones. They say that dreams that turn out to be true have a numinous or noetic quality that causes them to seem “realer than real.”

My patient who correctly dreamed she had three white spots on her left ovary was a typical example of someone who could tell the difference between ordinary and nonordinary dreams. Never before had she cried wolf because of a dream about her health, and she never did so afterwards. Her dream life seemed well calibrated, telling her when to pay attention to dream messages and when to disregard them.

Valid dreams also are frequently repetitive, as if they are clamoring for attention. In one example, a woman dreamed repeatedly for a year that a nurse was holding a lighted candle to her left lower leg. She could not figure out the meaning of this recurrent dream until a year later when she developed osteomyelitis, a painful bone infection requiring surgery, at the site the nurse was illuminating.34

As this dream shows, health-relevant information from the unconscious mind is often highly symbolic. In another example, a heavy smoker dreamed repetitively that he was in the army in combat. Seeking cover from machine-gun fire, he takes refuge in the hollow trunk of a large tree. The bullets penetrate the tree, however, and methodically cut the man in half from the left side of his lower chest to the right. A medical checkup revealed a small tumor on the left lower lobe of his lung, which had not metastasized.35

In another example, a medical student dreamed she was sinking into a cavity in the earth and was suffocating. Two months later she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, associated with cavities in the lungs and shortness of breath.36

Coincidence? 

Skeptics maintain that we only remember dreams of lucky hits and forget dreams that don’t pan out, and that this creates the illusion that we can acquire knowledge nonlocally through dreams. If we statistically compared the remembered hits with the forgotten misses, we’d see that nothing remarkable is going on and that valid dreams are mere chance happenings.

Yet, people do remember dreams that don’t come true. And in any case, statistics are an inadequate way of analyzing these matters. Human experiences are often so unique that they render the idea of statistical significance insignificant. For example, a great athlete may run a four-minute mile only once in his lifetime, among the hundreds of races in which he engages. A mathematical analysis would declare his singular accomplishment statistically insignificant, attributable to chance. But the athlete knows that his performance was not due to chance but to years of dedicated training combined with innate talent. He would probably be upset if he were met at the finish line by a statistician who told him that, although he ran the mile in under four minutes, it really didn’t mean a thing. In the same way, a statistical approach in analyzing the significance of dreams, intuitions, and premonitions is limited. Yet, in spite of these shortcomings, statistics remains one of the favorite weapons of the dream debunkers.

Sometimes, however, even the skeptics come around. A few years ago, I was involved in a book tour for my book Reinventing Medicine6 and was invited onto a live national radio show. Unknown to me, the host had also invited a well-known skeptical cardiologist, whose job was to debunk my book. The host began by asking me to relate my ideas about dreams. After I finished, he turned to the cardiologist and said, “What do you think about this stuff?” Following an awkward silence, the cardiologist said thoughtfully, “I think there may be something to it.” The host nearly fainted. Another long pause—then the cardiologist said, “I’d like to relate a dream of my own. I’ve never told this to anyone before.” He described how he had an elderly female patient in the hospital who required a cardiac catheterization. The night prior to the heart cath, the doctor dreamed that while he was performing the procedure, the patient’s eyes deviated to one side, she became speechless and unconscious, and became paralyzed on one side—a severe stroke. On waking, he wondered whether or not he should proceed with the cath in view of his nightmarish dream. Assuring himself that dreams mean nothing, he decided to go ahead. During the actual cath later that day the woman experienced a stroke in precisely the same pattern he dreamt the night before. Although the woman recovered totally, the experience shook him profoundly. For the rest of the radio program, the cardiologist and I had a delightful chat.

Why Unconscious? 

If nonlocal knowing is a valuable asset, why would it function outside our awareness so commonly, as during dreams? There are considerable advantages for its doing so. Vital bodily functions such as respiration, heartbeat, blood pressure, and immune activity tend to be automatized, outside the reach of conscious meddling. Although it is true that we can learn to exert conscious control—to a limited degree—over these processes through yoga or biofeedback training, they remain largely autonomic, outside of voluntary mastery. It is a blessing that we don’t have to attend to them consciously, for when we do we often make a mess of things. For example, when people pay too close attention to their breathing, they often hyperventilate, which can cause temporary incapacitation and loss of consciousness. Similarly, if we consciously tried to seize total control of our ability for nonlocal knowing, we would probably jam the works.

There are also strong sociocultural reasons why nonlocal knowing may have been shoved from the stage of consciousness. There is an old saying, “No priest wants a saint in his parish.” Saints make us feel inferior. Just so, people who claim they can gain information remotely are often resented by their peers and considered weird, deviant, mentally ill, or demonic. In the West, such people have consistently been shoved to the margins of society and considered outcasts. Often they have been condemned as witches or heretics and have paid with their lives. The situation is different in native cultures, of course, where nonlocal knowing is a valued part of every shaman’s repertoire.

Because Western societies have often reacted homicidally toward individuals who appear to possess these capacities, a low-profile variety of nonlocal knowing would be much safer than one that is obvious. One of the most effective ways of hiding such a trait would be to bury it in the unconscious mind of the individual. This would mean that not even the person possessing it would be aware it exists: the ultimate concealment.

Think what this would mean. If nonlocal awareness operated at the level of the unconscious, the possessors would be unaware when this faculty is functioning. When they gained information nonlocally, they would attribute this to other factors, not to themselves. Or if no convenient surrogate reasons were at hand, they could always invoke chance as the explanation. This would avoid a backlash from the surrounding community toward the knower, who would be as ignorant as everyone else about what really happened. This would permit everyone to shake their heads in amazement and marvel at the wonders of coincidence.

Avoiding Trains and Planes 

British biologist Lyall Watson, who has a keen sense for these matters, offers an example of how nonlocal knowing may foster survival.

William Cox, a businessman in North Carolina, used a simple and elegant method to test the idea that some people might be able to avoid traveling on trains that were going to be involved in an accident. He collected statistics on the total number of passengers who had traveled on the same train during each of the preceding seven days and on the fourteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days before the accident. His results, which cover several years of operation with the same equipment at the same station in a variety of weather, show that people did indeed seem to avoid accident-bound trains. There were always fewer passengers in the damaged and derailed coaches than would have been expected for the train at that time. It seems that some people, consciously or unconsciously, are sufficiently uneasy about a situation of that sort to find reason not to travel.37

Interpreting these findings, Watson states, “It is possible that when the need arises, we can scan our environment for information that would not be available to our normal senses. Such ability would certainly have survival value and will have been actively selected for and encouraged during the course of evolution.”37

People seemed to have avoided the doomed planes of 9/11, just as they steered clear of the fated trains in Cox’s study. Shortly after the tragedies, stories began to surface from people who changed their travel plans at the last moment because of a vague, gnawing feeling that something was not quite right.38 In one account, a woman suffered crippling stomach pains while standing in line to board one of the planes that flew into the Twin Towers. She went to the lavatory and recovered spontaneously but missed her flight and survived.19

American Airlines Flight 77, the Boeing 757 that crashed into the Pentagon, could have carried up to 289 people, yet only 64 seats were occupied, a 78% vacancy rate. American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767, could have carried 351 passengers, but was 74% unoccupied with only 92 on board. United Airlines Flight 175, another Boeing 767, also could have carried 351 people, but only 65 passengers flew that day, an 81% vacancy rate. United Airlines Flight 93, the Boeing 757 that crashed in Pennsylvania, was 84% unoccupied, with only 45 of 289 seats filled.39 All in all, the four planes were only 21% full. The train-avoidance effect described by Cox seemed to be operating on doomed planes as well.

Cowardice or Courage? 

A little over a century ago, Lord Kelvin, whom some consider the most distinguished physicist of the 19th century, declared X-rays an elaborate hoax, even before he saw Wilhelm Röntgen’s experimental notes and the evidence documenting his momentous discovery. One of the reasons behind Lord Kelvin’s hasty dismissal was the surge in spiritualism at the time, with widespread belief in ghosts, spirits, and contact with the dead. The eerie pictures produced by Röntgen’s X-rays resembled photographs of ectoplasm, a strange substance that, many mediums claimed, exuded from them during séances. (Lord Kelvin later reversed his opinion about X-rays and became a strong supporter of Röntgen.)40

Analogies abound in the current debates about nonlocal knowing. In the tradition of Lord Kelvin’s unfortunate example, many so-called skeptics denounce these phenomena without ever becoming familiar with the evidence.41 Many scientists consider nonlocal knowing a “third rail,” a topic that is so charged and untouchable that the reputation of any scientist who makes contact with it is severely damaged. (The third rail in a train system is the exposed electrical conductor that carries high-voltage power, which, if stepped on, usually results in electrocution.)42 Summing up this resistance, physicist Russell Targ concludes that it is mainly “academic bombast” that prevents this information from being generally acknowledged.43

We should not be deterred by this intellectual cowardice. Just as Lord Kelvin’s premature condemnation of X-rays eventually yielded to evidence, the objections of those who denounce nonlocal knowing will also be laid to rest by proper science, which continues to accumulate. Indeed, the process has already begun.

A nonlocal model of consciousness is not spun out of thin air but rests on careful observations and a variety of solid, replicated experiments. Nevertheless, if you find that the concept of nonlocal knowing and an expanded view of who you are impossible to accept, it may help if you bear in mind a principle that has never been proved wrong: “If it happens, it’s possible.”