Quest Magazine

Printed in the Spring 2012 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Overweg, Cynthia. "Joy Mills: An Evolutionary Journey" Quest  100. 2 (Spring 2012): pg. 50-55.

by Cynthia Overweg 

     Joy Mills is a dearly loved teacher and author and has served as national president of both the American and Australian Sections, as well as international vice-president, of the Theosophical Society. She was instrumental in the creation of Quest Books, the publishing imprint of the Theosophical Society in America, and has traveled the world giving lectures and seminars. In January 2011, she was awarded the Subba Row Medal, which recognizes outstanding contributions to Theosophical literature and understanding.

Over several weeks of interviews during the spring and summer of 2011, Joy openly shared the ups and downs of her life story, hoping it might resonate with others who seek meaning and purpose. The following is woven from many afternoons of conversations about her life and work at her home at the Krotona Institute of Theosophy in Ojai, California. 

As she traveled through the foothills of northern India, the breathtaking beauty of the western Himalayas was a sight to behold. The mountains were magically iridescent in the midday sun, and she could hardly contain her excitement. The year was 1972, and Joy Mills was on her way to Dharamsala to meet His Holiness the Dalai Lama at his residence-in-exile. It was a great honor for the Theosophical Society, and she could scarcely believe her good fortune.

     The rendezvous was the result of Joy's idea to publish the Dalai Lama's book Opening of the Wisdom-Eye, which up to that point had appeared only in south Asia. Traveling with her on this memorable journey was her good friend and colleague, Helen Zahara, who was senior editor of Quest Books."We were able to get the rights to publish the Dalai Lama's book, and since we already had a trip planned to Adyar, Helen and I wondered if we could meet with his Holiness," Joy recalls. They made arrangements through the Office of Tibet in New York, flew into Delhi, took the train north, and then hired a taxi to take them to Dharamsala.

     When they arrived at the Dalai Lama's home, they barely had a moment to gather their thoughts when his Holiness greeted them with what Joy describes as 'that wonderful smile." She recalls that Helen made the statement that H.P. Blavatsky had introduced the inner side of Buddhism to the Western world. "What did she write?" asked the Dalai Lama.

"The Voice of the Silence," Helen answered. Directing his next question to Joy, he asked, "What is the essence of The Voice of the Silence?" At first, Joy couldn't think. She wondered how she could express the book in a brief way. 'Well," she said finally,"it discusses the Paramitas," the six 'perfections" of Mahayana Buddhism. The Dalai Lama seemed genuinely excited. "Ah, then it is accurate. It is true." Joy was thrilled to be able to introduce the Dalai Lama to HPB's great little book, and the meeting is one of her most cherished memories.

     Joy was fifty-two years old when she first met the Dalai Lama. She is now ninety-one. Nothing in her formative years could have predicted that one day she would arrive at the Dalai Lama's doorstep representing the Theosophical Society. While her life is rich with accomplishments and service, there also has been hardship and neglect. The road that ultimately led her to Theosophy and to a profound respect for Buddhism, particularly the Dzogchen teaching of Tibetan Buddhism, began when she was a child.

     When Joy was born in Lakewood, Ohio, in 1920, the world was still recovering from the devastation of World War I, and America was just beginning its rise as an economic and military powerhouse. American women had finally won the right to vote only two months before Joy's birth.

      Joy's father was an engineer and her mother a schoolteacher. Her early life wasn't unusual until a family tragedy turned it upside down. When she was eight years old, Joy was confronted with a pivotal question: what happens after death? Her mother, Mary Conger, died of a massive heart attack at the age of forty-nine. Her father conveyed the sad news to Joy in one simple statement: "Mama has died." Very little was said between father and daughter on that shattering day in May 1929. As Joy knelt at her mother's bedside, it looked as though her mother was merely asleep, but there was a sad acceptance hanging in the air. 'I leaned over to kiss her cheek and she was cold. It was my first impression of the temporary nature of physical life."

      Her mother's death, Joy recalls, 'triggered a need to better understand what it means to be human. I've learned that if you stay with that question long enough, a much deeper question emerges—it's at the root of our very existence: —Who am I?'"

Not long after her mother's death, Joy got a taste of what that question points to. She was visiting the Ozark mountains in Missouri with her maternal aunt and uncle and three cousins. One day she hiked into the woods on her own, feeling a deep connection with nature and an exhilarating sense of freedom. 'I had an experience in those woods that altered my perception of life," said Joy.

The Ozarks are known for their white oaks and dogwood trees, along with loblolly pines, which can reach over a hundred feet in height. Joy had been walking for a while, absorbing the sights and sounds of the forest. Suddenly she found herself standing in front of a towering tree. "I became aware of the power and life in that tree. Then I became one with the tree. I could have slid right into it." In that instant, she knew that the life in the tree and the life within her were the same life. "At some level, it changed me. It's what HPB calls —direct beholding,' an insight which often comes unbidden, when seeing happens at a deeper level."    

     In October 1929, five months after the death of Joy's mother, a catastrophic stock market crash hit Wall Street. It ushered in the Great Depression and a decade of economic turmoil affecting millions of families. Hard times gave rise to the most difficult turning point of Joy's youth. Her father lost his engineering job and spent most of his time looking for work. Overwhelmed by his circumstances and the demands of being a single parent, he sent her away to live with people she didn't know. "I was boarded out to a family who lived in another school district and saw my father only on weekends. Everything that was familiar was taken away, so I bottled up my feelings and lived in my books. It was my only refuge."

     Two years later, when her father married a much younger woman, he tried reuniting with his daughter, but Joy's stepmother was verbally abusive and neglected her. "I wanted to tell my father, but I was afraid of what would happen, so I just took it." Her father soon realized the reunion he had imagined wasn't going to work out. 'I overheard him tell my paternal aunt and uncle that he might put me in a convent," Joy recalls. 'As an alternative, they offered to adopt me and I heard my father give his consent. I was being given away, and it really hurt."

     Once she was legally adopted, Joy took the surname of her adoptive father and the child who had been baptized as Mary Joy Conger became Joy Mills. At the age of twelve, her life began again with people who took much better care of her. 'I had a lonely and dislocated childhood and never felt like I belonged. I'm not unique in that experience, of course. But I'm grateful that it pushed me inward and forced me to ask a lot of questions about life. It fed my desire to understand why there is so much suffering in the world." 

     By the time Joy was a teenager, she was reading Aristotle and Plato while others her age were at football games or at the local teen hangout."I had a girlfriend at school who loved

discussing philosophy. It filled a void." As she grew older, a question about the concept of freedom emerged. For her as a child, freedom meant being able to ride her bicycle in the open air with the sun shining on her face. Freedom also meant ridding herself of isolation and loneliness.

   "'But I see the world differently now," she says. 'The more we realize the Oneness of all things, the more we realize that freedom is a kind of illusion. The only real genuine freedom is to be free from the desires of a separated self. HPB refers to it as the —obligatory pilgrimage of the soul.' This is our collective evolutionary journey."     

     When Joy graduated from high school in 1937, the country was still in the grips of the Depression and money was tight, but with the help of student loans she was able to go to Milwaukee State Teachers College in Wisconsin. In 1940, when she was a twenty-year-old student, she was introduced to Theosophy by a college friend and joined the Theosophical Society. 'Theosophy made the world comprehensible to me. It fulfilled me in so many ways, and it opened a door to the unseen."

     In June 1941, Joy was graduated with a degree in education and spent the summer working at national headquarters in Wheaton. She tried securing a teaching position for the fall, but nothing materialized. Sydney Cook, who was president of the American Section at the time, asked her what she wanted to do if a job didn't come through. She told him she wanted to go to graduate school. 'He was very kind and generous to me and said he would help." Cook paid half of her postgraduate tuition at the University of Chicago. The other half was paid by a university scholarship.

     When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, some of the university's facilities were turned over to the military. To earn spending money, Joy found herself helping in the war effort. She would get up early in the morning and go into the dining hall, where about a thousand sailors needed to be fed breakfast. 'I would sling hash all morning for the sailors stationed there," she says.

     Joy earned her master's degree in English the following year, and Cook invited her to join the staff at Olcott. 'He asked me to think it over first, but I didn't have to. I knew where I wanted to be." Her first job was to coordinate a correspondence course for new members. The following year, Cook asked her to do some lecture work. 'He wanted to try me out, as it were."

     The plan was to send her to a number of cities in Michigan, where there were local branches of the Society. 'But I had no suitable wardrobe and insufficient money, as staff salaries back then were minimal." So the Olcott staff went shopping in thrift stores on her behalf. 'It was wonderful how they helped me. They found clothing which made me look presentable." For the first time in her life, Joy felt a sense of belonging. She was in an environment at Olcott that nourished body and soul. "I realized I aspired to something greater than myself. I had a mission, and these were my people, my friends. I was home."

As Joy studied The Secret Doctrine and other Theosophical literature, the principle of Oneness stood out ”the Oneness she had experienced as a child in the Ozarks. "HPB always pointed to it. Everything is rooted in and is derived from a source that is One, not multiple. It's more than monistic, it's nondual."

When she became more familiar with the contributions of the Society's founders, her admiration of Henry Olcott and H.P. Blavatsky grew. "Olcott's work for the Buddhist cause is just incredible. He's responsible for the revival of Buddhism as a major cultural force in southeast Asia, and he did that while he was president of the Society. HPB is one of the most remarkable women who ever lived. She brought an ancient teaching to the West, and people from all over the world and in all walks of life have been drawn to it. She reminded us that compassion is —the law of laws.'"    

     During the war years, food, heating oil, and gasoline were rationed. The Olcott staff was given food coupons, and because Olcott is a vegetarian campus, they were allotted more cheese, butter, milk, and other items, since they didn't need the meat coupons. To conserve heating oil, the second-floor offices and the library were closed. 'We drew closer to each other," Joy remembers. 'We were like a family, and for me it was a tremendous feeling. It was the first stable family I'd had in my life."

     At the end of the war, Jim Perkins was elected president of the American Section. Membership had declined sharply, and many members had been lost in the war. 'Jim came up with a program known as Spotlight [SPOT—Speed Popularization of Theosophy] to reinvigorate the Society," says Joy. 'We started in 1946 with six cities in a circuit, and I would give a series of classes for six weeks." It was a very successful program. Joy would rent a hall, usually in a hotel, and run newspaper ads to promote the classes. Over a three-year period, she helped to establish more than one hundred new lodges.

     At age twenty-seven, Joy had already made a significant contribution to the Society's growth in the postwar years. She loved the work and loved Olcott, but felt it was time to earn a bit more money and start putting away some savings. In 1948, she accepted a teaching position in Seattle. 'It was difficult leaving Olcott, but I wasn't leaving Theosophy; I was going into the profession I had trained for." She taught U.S. history at West Seattle High School. 'I tried to make history come alive for my students. I wanted them to be critical thinkers and not buy into the media's way of presenting the world."

     During this time Joy remained very active in the Society, becoming president of the Northwest Federation. Seven years later, Perkins needed an editor for The American Theosophist (predecessor to today's Quest), so at his invitation she returned to Olcott. 'I fell in love with the beauty of the Northwest, but going back to Wheaton felt like the right thing to do." She took over the department of education at Olcott in 1955 and from that point forward dedicated her life exclusively to the Society.

     In 1960, Henry Smith was elected president and asked Joy to run as vice-president. She agreed, but five years later he resigned, and Joy became acting president. In 1966, she was overwhelmingly elected president and served in that position until 1974. Her tenure as president of the American Section was one of the most productive in the Society's history. With the help of the Kern Foundation, Joy launched Quest Books, a seminal achievement for the Society. As Quest grew, she led a fundraising effort for the construction of a publications building to house its expansion. The building now bears her name.

     Joy served as president during a time of great unrest, when the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement provoked violent clashes on the streets of American cities and awakened millions of people to a need for social justice and equality. "I wrote some rather strong editorials suggesting that we have a responsibility to speak up—to take a stand for brotherhood. It was controversial at the time because while some members agreed with brotherhood in theory, in practice they accepted segregation."

     At one point Joy was criticized for joining a local chapter of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). "While we can't involve the Society in politics," she points out, 'we can speak up individually on matters of conscience, and that's what I did. The founders stood for human dignity and equality, and Annie Besant was a great champion of that. Brotherhood has been an object of the Society from its beginning, and it states very clearly that all peoples are brothers, or it means nothing at all."

     The word "brotherhood" stirs controversy for some members because it can be interpreted to exclude women and girls. 'We know it refers to everyone, but I wish we could have a gender-free language," says Joy. 'We live in a world with a dim awareness of how language labels people or leaves them out entirely. In some ways, we need a new language which overcomes that—and language does evolve."

     Near the end of her third term as president of the American Section, the Society's beloved international president, N. Sri Ram, passed away. When John Coats was elected to take up Sri Ram's position, he nominated Joy to become international vice-president. She left Wheaton in 1974 and went to live in Adyar, serving in that post for six years. 'When I was on the plane going to Adyar from Chicago, I had that old feeling of being without a home again. But I love India, and the adjustment to living there came easily." While she was in Adyar, she met the Dalai Lama for a second time when His Holiness was the featured speaker at the Society's international conference in 1975. "John and I had the privilege of having tea with His Holiness," she recalls.

     In 1980, Joy was invited by Anne Green, then resident head of the Krotona Institute of Theosophy, to become director of the Krotona School. "That really appealed to me because it meant getting back into what I love most—education and teaching." Joy reinvigorated educational programs at Krotona, establishing a legacy of excellence. Twelve years later, in 1992, the search committee of the Australian Section asked her to run for president of that Section. Joy was ready for another challenge and was elected by a wide margin.

     She returned to Krotona in 1996, where she now lives, to take up residence as teacher, lecturer, and author. Over the past seventy-two years, Joy has traveled to sixty countries, teaching through seminars and lecture tours and nourishing countless Theosophical students. She is a role model to many others who seek her counsel and advice. She has authored several outstanding books, including the recently published Reflections on an Ageless Wisdom: A Commentary on the Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett. Her other books include The One True Adventure: Theosophy and the Quest for Meaning; One Hundred Years of Theosophy; and Entering on the Sacred Way.

     Joy never married, although sixty years ago she considered the possibility. "He was a good man, a Theosophist, but I needed my freedom. The work was all-absorbing to me, and I would have been a terrible housewife."

As she glances through her living room window at her favorite oak tree, Joy is reminded of the experience she had many years earlier in the woods of the Ozarks. 'You can look at a tree and see firewood, or you can see a living presence with a purpose and intelligence of its own."

     Joy then returns to the theme of Oneness and the evolutionary journey to a better understanding of what it means to be human. "The mind likes to separate —me' from —other." We need to be aware of that because it brings us back to the fundamental question: —Who am I?" And that question evolves as you evolve. As HPB said in so many different ways, once we have felt compassion for another living being, we have begun to awaken to the purpose and meaning of existence. That is the essence of Theosophy."    

Cynthia Overweg is a journalist, playwright, and documentary filmmaker. She has written for the Ventura County Star and the Los Angeles Times. Her plays have been produced in Los Angeles, New York, and Pennsylvania, including an award-winning play based on the life of H.P. Blavatsky. She was a war correspondent and photographer during the Balkan War, traveling with Save the Children and United Nations relief organizations to produce a documentary film on the effects of war on children. Her other documentaries include The Great Bronze Age of China, which aired on PBS.

Printed in the Winter 2012 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Targ, Russell. "Questioning Reality: A Physicist's View of Psychic Abilities"Quest  100. 1 (Winter 2012): 13-17.

by Russell Targ

If the doors of perception were cleansed,
every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things
through narrow chinks of his cavern.
—William Blake

In this article I will present what I consider to be the  very best evidence for psychic abilities. These abilities—which we all possess—offer a spacious mind that can change your life and your view of reality. Buddhists and Hindus have known this since before the time of Christ. The scientific evidence is now overwhelming, and modern physics has the means and tools to embrace it. Such abilities have many names; ESP (extrasensory perception) is presently the most familiar. Others include clairvoyance and psi. The lat­ter is derived from psi ?, the twenty-third letter of the Greek alphabet, referring to the Greek psych?, meaning "psyche" or "soul."

My background is in experimental physics and perceptual psychology. I have published more than a hundred refereed technical papers dealing with lasers, laser applications, and ESP research in some of the best scientific journals. And I was a senior staff scientist and project manager for more than two decades at Lock­heed Missiles and Space Company and at GTE Sylva­nia, where I specialized in laser communications and atmospheric wind-shear measurements with lasers. As a laser physicist with forty years of experience in psy­chic research, I am convinced from the ever-growing data that most people can learn to quiet their minds and move their awareness from their ordinary ego-based mind-set to a much more spacious and interesting per­spective&mash;one that is not obstructed by conventional barriers of space and time. This meditative skill is what the eighth-century Buddhist master Padmasainbhava called moving from conditioned awareness to spacious or naked awareness.

My firm conclusion from decades of ESP research is that we misapprehend the physical and psychologi­cal nature of the interconnected space-time in which we live. Our internalized perception of nature is often obstructed and obscured by mental noise. This illusion and misperception is what Buddhists call maya or samsara',and it can cause a lot of unnecessary suffering.

 I believe in ESP because I have seen psychic mir­acles day after day in university- and government-sponsored investigations. It is clear to me, without any doubt, that many people can learn to look into remote distances and into the future with great accuracy and reliability. This is what we call unobstructed aware­ness, or more specifically remote viewing. Remote viewing is a psychic ability that involves learning how to quiet your mind and separate the visual images of the psychic signal from the noise of the uncontrolled chatter of the mind. With remote viewing you can describe and experience objects and events that are shielded from ordinary perception by distance or time. To varying degrees, we all have this ability, and I do not believe that it, or any ESP state, has metaphysical origins. I believe it is just a kind of thinking in which we expand our awareness to perceive nonlocally. And it will become less mysterious as more of us become more skillful. Today there are almost a million Google pages devoted to information about "remote viewing." So at least some people are catching on to the idea that this is not difficult to do.

For example, while working for a CIA program at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, Cali­fornia, our psychic viewers were able to find a downed Russian bomber in Africa, describe the health of Amer­ican hostages in Iran, and locate a kidnapped American general in Italy. We also described Soviet weapons fac­tories in Siberia, observed a Chinese atomic bomb test three days before it occurred, and performed countless other amazing tasks.

I was cofounder of the above-mentioned ESP research program at SRI. This twenty-million-dollar, twenty-three-year program, launched during the Cold War, was supported by the CIA, NASA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Army and Air Force intelligence, and many other government agencies. We developed the technique of remote viewing, which enabled a per­son to accurately describe and experience places and events blocked from ordinary perception. We published our highly significant findings in Nature, Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and The Proceedings of the American Institute of Phys­ics. Our research has been replicated worldwide, and remote viewing is so easy to do that it has become a cottage industry. Many of those teaching it are from the Army Psychic Corps that we created at Fort Meade, Maryland, in the 1980s.

Two further outstanding events in my psychic career involved, first, my little post-SRI research group called Delphi Associates, where we made $120,000 by psychi­cally forecasting&mash;for nine weeks in a row, the direction and amount of changes in the silver commodity futures market, without error. This successful forecasting of "December silver" made the front page of The Wall Street Journal and led to a film (The Case of ESP) for the PBS series NOVA in 1983. In the other notable suc­cess, our SRI lab was the first to identify and name the kidnapper of heiress Patricia Hearst, who had been abducted from her home in Berkeley in 1974. Our great friend and psychic policeman Pat Price went with us to the Berkeley police station, where I stood with him at a big wooden table as he put his finger on the face of a man his ESP sensed as Hearst's kidnapper. He did this from a police loose-leaf mug book of hundreds of pho­tos (four to a page). He then went on to tell the police where to find the kidnapper's car. When all these facts were confirmed the following day, I knew I had just seen a "miracle." In these cases there is absolutely no chance that it was just our lucky day!

There are presently four classes of published and carefully examined ESP experiments that are indepen­dently significant, at odds much greater than one in a million. All the researchers involved in these pillars of ESP research have been friends and colleagues of mine for decades. I will present the data for these in what follows.

Remote Viewing. At Princeton University, Profes­sor Robert Jahn and his associate Brenda Dunn over­saw two decades of remote viewing experiments with Princeton students as subjects. They asked students in the laboratory to describe their mental impressions of what it looked like where someone else was hiding at a randomly chosen distant location. These students had to fill out a thirty-item checklist to quantify their perceptions in this game of psychic hide-and-seek. Their findings &mash; spanning several years and compris­ing a series of 411 trials &mash; showed that it is no harder to look hundreds of miles in the distance than it to describe a person around the corner. Furthermore, it is no harder to describe a randomly chosen hiding place to be selected in the next hour, day, or week than it to describe a hidden contemporaneous event under way at the moment. Jahn's highly significant results were published in Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1982 as a replication of our original SRI remote viewing experiments, which had been published in the same journal six years earlier.

Modern physics would describe these phenom­ena as nonlocal in that they are experimentally found to be independent of space and time. Nonlocality and entanglement, which were first described by Erwin Schrodinger in the late 1920s, are now among the hot­test research topics in modern physics. This intrigu­ing phenomenon is explained very clearly by Anton Zeilinger, one of the world's leading experimentalists in quantum optics, in his 2010 book Dance of the Pho­tons: From Einstein to Teleportation: "Entanglement describes the phenomenon that two particles may be so intimately connected to each other that the measure­ment of one instantly changes the quantum state of the other, no matter how far away it may be. This nonlo­cality is exactly what Albert Einstein called 'spooky'; it seems eerie that the act of measuring one particle could instantly influence the other one."

Distant Mental Influence. In the 1970s and 1980s William Brand and Marilyn Schlitz carried out nineteen imaginative, success­ful, and published experiments in what they called Distant Mental Influence on Living Systems (DMILS). In these experiments, a precursor to other National Institutes of Health-supported distant healing experi­ments, the researchers showed convincingly that the thoughts of one person, the experi­menter, can affect the physiology (heart rate, skin resistance, etc.) of a distant person in another laboratory. Braud, who is now teach­ing at the Institute for Transpersonal Physiology in Palo Alto, California, was able to psychically calm or excite the physiology of a person hundreds of feet away. He has compiled twelve of his highly significant formal experiments and pub­lished them in an excellent and comprehensive book called Distant Mental Influence. Schlitz is now presi­dent of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California. 

The Ganzfeld. Over a span of thirty years, several researchers at five different labs here and abroad car­ried out telepathy experiments in which one person was in a situation of sensory isolation (called the Ganz­feld, German for "whole field"). This person was asked to describe his or her ongoing mental impressions of a video clip being watched by a friend in a separate part of the lab. In a published meta-analysis of seventy-nine studies, comprising hundreds of individual trials, the significance approached one in a billion, meaning that the isolated receiver was extraordinarily success­ful in describing what his distant friend was seeing and experiencing. 

Feeling the Future. Recently, Professor Daryl Bem at Cornell University has carried out a series of nine precognition experiments. In this remarkable five-year study, he showed that the future can affect the past in surprising subconscious ways. That is, the elephant you see on television in the morning can be the cause of your having dreamed about elephants the previous night: Saturday morning's elephant caused Friday's dream. We call that retrocausality&mash;another hot topic in modern physics today. For example, students in Bem's experiments reliably favor and choose one picture of four possible pictures of people, if they are shown that one after they have made their choice&mash;even though the one they are shown later has been randomly cho­sen after their conscious choice. Bern's sixty-page paper presenting his meta-analysis of these retrocausal experiments was published in 2010. The experiments show a significance of more than six standard deviations, which equals odds of more than a billion to one for this eminent and experienced experimenter. In all his experiments, Bern's one thousand Cornell student par­ticipants find themselves making free choices, guided again and again by the material they see or experience in the future, after their selection. Many people believe that precognition is the dominant phenomenon in all psychic functioning. From Bern's recent precognition experiments at Cornell and my own successful fore­casting of silver commodity markets, it appears that we humans have the ability to expand our perceived "now" to include as much of the future as we choose to experience.

During one experiment at SRI while I was working with psychic Pat Price, Price did not arrive at the lab for the scheduled trial. In this series of ten trials, we were trying to describe the day-to-day activities of Hal Puthoff (co-founder of the SRI program) as he traveled through Colombia, in South America. Price had thus far been describing churches, harbors, markets, and volcanoes. We had not yet received any feedback and wouldn't until Hal returned, so I had no clues at all to what he was doing. Therefore, in Price's absence, and in the spirit of "the show must go on," I spontaneously decided to undertake the remote viewing myself. Previ­ously I had been only an interviewer and facilitator for such trials. So this was in fact my first remote viewing.

FIGURE 1. Sketch produced by physicist Russell Targ as remote viewer. Targ correctly saw and described "sand and grass on the right, an airport building on the left, and ocean at the end of a runway."

I closed my eyes and immediately had an image of an island airport. The surprisingly accurate sketch I drew is shown in figure 1. A photo of the airport site is shown in figure 2. From this trial, we learned that even a scientist can be psychic when the need is great enough. I am not making any claims for my own psychic prowess in this demonstration. If I have any ability in that direction, it is the same as anyone else who will sit in a chair and quiet his mind. Artists and musicians generally do much better at remote viewing than physi­cists or engineers, who favor analysis. Artists are accus­tomed to using the nonanalytic right side of the brain, which greatly facilitates psi, itself a nonanalytic.

Hence numerous laboratory experiments indicate that we have the opportunity to know anything upon which we fix our attention. That is what the research data on ESP seem to be saying. In my experience and according to most other researchers, it appears that an experienced psychic can answer any question that has an answer. The Hindu and Buddhist literature of the past two millennia also indicates that these abili­ties are natural and available. I cannot wait to see what the future holds when we fully open the doors of our perception!

	FIGURE 2. This photograph shows the target, which was an airport on an island in San Andreas, Colombia.

When I say I believe in ESP, it's not like saying that I believe in life on other planets somewhere in the uni­verse or in that I believe in democracy. Rather it is like saying that I believe in Maxwell's equations relating electromagnetism and light, quantum mechanics, or lasers&mash;surprising and hard to believe, but nonethe­less true and scientifically provable. The experimen­tal evidence from a century of research in extrasensory perception from laboratories around the world is so strong and overwhelming that reasonable people sim­ply should no longer doubt its reality. That powerful and undeniable evidence is why I believe in ESP, and why I think you should too.

For me, questioning reality and the exploration of psychic abilities are the essential first steps in the greatest opportunity we have as a species, the evolu­tion of consciousness. I believe we have completed our physical evolution. Our brains are big enough. I am proposing that species transcendence is the next evo­lutionary step for us to take: We started first as animals looking for food, then became moderately self-aware humans trying to understand nature, and finally we have reached our destiny as beings aware of our spa­cious and nonlocal consciousness, transcending space and time. In exploring what physicists call our nonlo­cal universe, we begin to feel that the Buddhists had it right when they teach that separation is an illusion and that all consciousness is connected. In this world of entangled or extended minds, compassion seems to me to be a natural conclusion. It's an idea whose time has come&mash;that when one person suffers, we all suffer. 

It is time to accept the gift of psychic abilities. The suffering, wars, and confused search for meaning we are experiencing are all evidence of our inner selves sensing but not yet grasping our true nature. The hard­ware is fine; it's the software that must be upgraded&mash;and quickly.

References

Bern, Daryl "Feeling the Future: Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect." Journal of Personality and Social Affect 100 (2011), 407-25.

Braud, William. Distant Mental Influence: Its Contributions to Science and Healing. Charlottesville, Va.: Hampton Roads, 2003.

The Case of ESP. BBC Horizon, Tony Edwards, producer, 1983; NOVA, 1983.

Dunne, Brenda, and Robert Jahn. "Information and Uncertainty in Remote Perception Research." Journal of Scientific Exploration, 17:2 (2003), 207-41. (Meta-analysis of two decade's research.)

Jahn, Robert. "The Persistent Paradox of Psychic

Phenomena: An Engineering Perspective." Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 70:2 (Feb. 1982),136-68.

Larson, Erik. "Did Psychic Powers Give Firm a Killing in the

Silver Market?" The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 22,1984, Bl. Padmasambhava. Self-Liberation through Seeing with Naked

Awareness. Translated by John Myrdhin Reynolds. Ithaca,

Puthoff, H. E., and Russell Targ. "A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective and Recent Research." Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 64:3 (March 1976), 329-54.

Rauscher, Elizabeth, and Russell Targ. "Investigation of a Complex Space-Time Metric to Describe Precognition of the Future." In Daniel Sheehan, Frontiers of Time: Retrocausation: Experiment and Theory. Melville, N.Y.: American Institute of Physics, 2006,121-46.

Schlitz, Marilyn, and William Braud. "Distant Intentionality and Healing: Assessing the Evidence." Alternative Therapies, 3:6 (Nov. 1997), 62-72.

Storm, Lance, Patrizio Tressoldi, and Lorenzo Risio. "Meta-Analysis of Free-Response Studies, 1992-2008: Assessing Noise Reduction Model in Parapsychology." Psychological Bulletin, 136:4 (2010), 471-85.

Targ, Russell, and H. E. Puthoff. "Information Transmission under Conditions of Sensory Shielding." Nature, 252 (Oct. 1974), 602-607.

Zeilinger, Anton. Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Telepertation. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010.

RUSSELL TARG is a physicist and author, and was a pioneer in the development of the laser. He cofounded and worked for the CIA-sponsored Stanford Research Institute's investigation into psychic abilities. He is coauthor of eight books dealing with the scientific investigation of psychic abilities, including Limitless Mind: A Guide to Remote Viewing; Transformation of Consciousness; and his autobiography, Do You See What I See: Memoirs of a Blind Biker. This article is adapted from his latest book, The Reality of ESP: A Physicist's View of Psychic Abilities,  published  by Quest Books.

Originally printed in the Winter 2012 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard . "From the Editor's Desk" Quest  100. 1 (Winter 2012): 2.

Most people avoid dealing with awkward sub­jects. For the writer of editorials, however, it's these issues that provide the richest material. In this case I'm referring to that curious part of the Theosophical lineage known as the Third Object. As you know, the Three Objects are statements of prin­ciple that you ought to agree with in order to join the Theosophical Society, but the third of these three puts Theosophy at an uncomfortable juncture.

The Third Object is (as you can see by flipping back a page to the masthead, where it is reproduced in every issue of Quest) "to investigate unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in humanity." In prin­ciple there seems to be nothing wrong with this. And yet it points to an agenda that creates discomfort among many Theosophists today.

Because investigating these "powers latent in humanity" brings up the vexed issue of developing occult capacities. As Russell Targ's article in this issue suggests, paranormal powers such as telepathy, clair­voyance, and precognition are, surprisingly perhaps, skills much like piano playing or writing poetry: every­one has them in embryonic form, and they can be devel­oped easily enough (although, of course, some people will have more of an aptitude for them than others). But Theosophists often frown on this kind of development. The literature issues strong warnings against acquiring these powers for their own sake.

Well, then, which is it to be? Investigating the pow­ers latent in humanity or avoiding the investigation of these powers because of their spiritual dangers? You can't, it would seem, have it both ways, and the frequent result is to avoid the issue entirely. Unfortunately, this approach sets aside much of the Theosophical heritage, which has a long tradition of developing these pow­ers, whether it is a matter of seeing chakras and astral forms generated by the Christian sacraments, as with C. W Leadbeater, or, as with Dora Kunz, communicat­ing with nature spirits.

So what should we do about psychic powers? In try­ing to answer this question from my own experience, I see that my views are by no means simple or easy to articulate. On the one hand, the warnings are valid. Making occult investigations without the proper pre­cautions which include a clean way of life and motives that are reasonably pure is extremely dangerous. Indeed I would go further and say that it is dangerous even with the safeguards. Anyone who seriously tries to explore and develop these latent powers can probably expect to suffer some psychological and perhaps even physical damage as a result. This can occur even when there is no direct or obvious connection between the damage and one's investigations.

It would seem to make sense, then, to avoid these risks and simply cultivate your own garden lead a life of quiet study and service without attempting to develop any unusual capacities. And yet I find that I don't agree completely with this advice.

The fact is, the human race has never progressed merely by staying safe in its own little garden. Human advancement has always made ample use of adventur­ers, explorers, even fools and scoundrels, and the world of psychic investigation is no exception.

The best analogy I can think of is athletics. Cer­tainly it's possible to maintain a healthy level of fitness by exercising sensibly. This is by far the best approach for most people, and they can generally do this without being injured. But there are those who are not going to be happy with this prudent advice; they want to exceed and excel. These are the athletes; it is they who set the records, and it is they whose performances we so admire. But exerting yourself to this degree is fraught with dangers, and I suspect that there are few great athletes who have not had to cope with injury - often serious injury - at some point.

We aren't all going to be athletes, nor are we all going to be crack explorers of the astral realms. That will be reserved, as it has always been, to the small elite who have the talent and make the effort to surpass the usual expectations of what's possible for the human mind. But in my opinion it is as foolish to forbid such explorations as it is to pursue them carelessly.

If you are one of the few who do decide to investi­gate these latent powers, the most important require­ment is honesty. This would include being clear about what works and what doesn't as well as distinguish­ing what the books have to say from what you know through experience. Most important of all is an inner honesty a willingness to see into your own motives, good and bad, for the journey you have chosen to make.

This same quality is necessary in a collective body such as the TS. In this case it involves a willingness to see through old prejudices and ways of thinking that may have been useful a generation or two ago but are not what are required today. Most of all, it requires creating a safe space in which people can discuss their paranormal experiences ”both accidental and deliber­ately" induced. This is hardly alien to the Theosophical tradition as a whole; indeed it has often characterized the tradition at its best. Not all of us can be explorers, but we all can treat our explorers with respect and honor them for their daring and their discoveries. 

Richard Smoley

Originally printed in the Winter 2012 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Boyd, Tim. "A Problem with Spirituality." Quest  100. 1 (Winter 2012): 10-11.

By Tim Boyd
National President 

Recently a group of us at the Olcott center got together to plan an eight-week program called "The Essentials of Spiritual Practice." The idea was that during the course of those weeks we would address the elements of a holistic and effective prac­tice, making the necessary links between practice and the principles that support it. Our hope was that regardless of whether individuals had been practicing for years or were just beginning, they would leave feel­ing empowered to more deeply pursue their chosen paths. In the process of talking it through, it became clear that some effort toward defining our terms was required.

In contemporary culture we find the word "spiri­tual" popping up with increasing frequency. It has become common for people to say, "I am spiritual, but not religious" as a way of identifying their approach to the divine. More and more we hear people referring to their "spiritual practice." Spiritual leaders also seem to abound. And we now find ourselves exposed to Bud­dhist, Hindu, Kabbalistic, Gnostic, Native American, Druid, Mayan, and a host of other forms of spiritual­ity. All these currents of things spiritual can easily get muddled. It's enough to confuse a person.

Although we get a sense that spirituality is about something like religion, for most people the meaning of the word is unclear. The ordinary view is that spiri­tual things are otherworldly, removed from what is regarded as the "real world." If we were to look in the dictionary, the various definitions might not be a great help to us. The dictionary defines "spiritual" as "incor­poreal," "affecting the soul of man," "pertaining to God," "sacred or religious," etc. While all of this gives some shades of meaning, it does not give us much to work with in terms of defining our own approach to spirit. One useful hint is found in the word's etymology. The root for the word "spirit" is spiritus, the Latin word for "breath." At the most basic physiological level the breath sustains life. In much religious sym­bolism it is the breath (spirit) that actually brings life into being. In the Bible God "breathed the breath of life" into Adam. In Hinduism universes are breathed out and breathed in.

A few years ago I had become a little frustrated with the slide in meaning for the word. I had the sense that it was being overused to the point that it was becoming meaningless, a mere buzzword. I thought I was jok­ing when I predicted that at this rate, soon "spiritual" would become a marketing term. There would be spiri­tual clothing, spiritual gym shoes, spiritual spas. A few months later I found myself driving through a neigh­borhood that I had not visited for a while. As I turned a corner I looked up at the sign for a local business and there it was in bold letters "Spiritual Boutique."

So what do I mean by "spiritual"? Let me begin with an example. In the human body there are an esti­mated 75-100 trillion cells. It is an astounding num­ber, beyond our comprehension. It is a number larger than the number of galaxies in the universe, and even greater than the amount of the U.S. national debt. The cell is the basic building block of all living organisms. From the perspective of biology, it is the smallest living thing. Although we think of these cells as being a part of that greater something we each call "me," to the individual cell that "me" is irrelevant. Each of these 100 trillion cells that make up our bod­ies has needs and activities of its own. The cell needs nutrition. It is looking to reproduce. It seeks an envi­ronment that will be hospitable to its growth. Whether I have a good day at work, or enjoy the movie I am watching, or am mad at my daughter is of little conse­quence to the cell.

 If somehow one of these cells began to sense that it was a part of something greater, and felt an urgency to connect with or more consciously participate in that greater something, that would be a cell with a dawning spiritual awareness. If the cell began to inquire into the workings of that greater something, this would be spiritual study. If from the information that the cell acquired, it developed a discipline that enhanced its awareness of the greater whole, this would be its spiri­tual practice. if the cell became aware of other cells who had this same awakening and who had pursued it to a point where they actually were in harmony with the energies and patterns of that greater some­thing—cells who could say, "I and the 'greater' are one" —those cells would be spiritual teachers. You get the idea. Unity is the basis of spirituality, and all move­ment in the direction of a deeper experience of one­ness can be called spiritual.

The cell example, although impossible, makes a point. We, like the cells, "live, move, and have our being" within a greater life. The various ways that we describe that life indicate both the extent and the limits of our perception. In Shakespeare's Hamlet the state­ment is made, "There are more things in heaven and earth...than are dreamt of in your philosophy." This applies as much to our individual musings as to con­temporary scientific opinion or the formulations of the world's religions. Each of these attempts at knowing has a certain merit to it, but is at best partial. It could not be any other way.

It is no far-fetched idea for any of us to say that we live within an ever-expanding hierarchy of these greater wholes. The most obvious of these "greaters" are the connections we have with blood family mem­bers, the tribe or community, the nation, and, more and more, the planet. As human beings we all recognize ourselves to be a part of the human family. For a long time this observation, although self-evident, could be ignored. The farthest we had to extend our sense of relationship was the local community, or maybe to our particular nation. We could feel sufficiently comfort­able to think and act locally, only occasionally look­ing up to focus on a broader network of relationships. However, circumstances are such today that an aware­ness of our intimate involvement in things greater than ourselves is imposing itself on us. We don't have much choice. We have to wake up.

There are a number of other "greaters" which are perhaps less obvious, but which powerfully influence us. One of the most overlooked, but perhaps most potent, world we live in is the world of thought—not just our own thoughts, but the environment created by the combined thinking of all  of the people in the world. On one level it seems far-fetched to consider the possibility of being influenced by the thoughts of  people we have never encountered, people who are not the leading thinkers, or movers and shakers on the world scene. If the president says something, it probably will affect us. If a famous scientist says something, we might consider it. Poets and artists can move us. But to believe that we are influenced by the countless name­less, faceless people like you and me thinking their pri­vate thoughts might seem like a stretch. Yet in the book Thought Power Annie Besant comments, "Most people think along certain lines, not because they have care­fully thought a question out and come to a conclusion, but because large numbers of people are thinking along those lines, and carry others with them." She goes on to point out, "There are also certain national ways of thinking, definite and deeply cut channels, resulting from the continual reproduction during centuries of similar thoughts, arising from the history, the strug­gles, the customs of a nation. These profoundly modify and color all minds born into the nation."

The necessary companion of a broadening spiritu­ality is a broadening level of responsibility—for our actions, our feelings, and our thoughts. As we unfold we lose the option of saying, "It's not my fault." One of the greatest messages of the founders of the Theo­sophical Society, which we find echoed in the global message of the Dalai Lama, is compassion. The Voice of the Silence says, "Compassion is no attribute. It is the Law of laws." With the growing awareness of the abiding presence of the One Life, our responsiveness to the needs and suffering of the myriad individual lives participating in the greater whole must also grow. Spirituality is not merely a balm for the individual soul or a feeling of peace and harmony, although certainly these are some of its by-products. Spirituality exceeds the individual. This is a problem, but only in the sense that was expressed in the Christian scriptures, "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." A sense of responsibility for the suffering of others, which is the hallmark of spirituality, is an uncomfortable mind-set for the immature personality, steeped as it is in self-admiration.

Fortunately, our level of control over this process is minimal. We are much like a gardener. Our role in all of this is not to manipulate the sunshine, or cause the sky to rain, but to nurture and provide the conditions for the seed to grow. As we wisely fulfill this role, within ourselves we witness the stirrings of new life. The seeds of compassion, kindness, and responsibility, which ultimately yield the fruits of the spiritual life, come alive and flourish. May this time soon arrive for all of us.