Modeling Magick and Remote Viewing

Any time you want to do parapsychology research, skeptics do their best to make you jump through all sorts of hoops. To be clear, real skepticism is important to any scientific endeavor. However, capital-S Skeptics take that a whole lot further. Thanks to their influence, most psychic research that sees the light of day is focused on "proving" whether psychic abilities exist at all, over and over again. Government agencies like the CIA don't bother with that sort of thing. When they find something that works, they exploit it for all it's worth.

The CIA ran a "remote viewing" program up until it was shut down in 1995. Basically, they trained people to function as psychic spies and developed a protocol that helped many people develop what is essentially a form of clairvoyance. They called this method Coordinate Remote Viewing or CRV. And they compiled plenty of evidence that it worked, as revealed in declassified documents from the program. The big question is how, which so far has not been worked out. This is also the big question surrounding magick and paranormal abilities.

According to a CIA document declassified on 08/07/2000 titled “Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV) Technology 1981–1983,” submitted to the organization August 4 of 1983, coordinate remote viewing “utilized through the methodologies that have been developed…works with remarkable precision,” but the individuals who submitted it admitted that they were “unable to explain in conventional terms why it is that the co-ordinate serves as a stimulus in the manner it does.” Nevertheless, they were convinced that David Bohm’s model of quantum mechanics provided a potentially plausible explanatory hypothesis for the mechanisms that make it possible.

David Bohm was a controversial yet brilliant luminary in physics who argued that the entirety of the cosmos is populated with quantum black holes that lead from the “explicate order” of spacetime to a realm that transcends space and time which he referred to as the “implicate order.” These black holes were termed “holospheres,” and hypothesized as the mechanism which connects the implicate order to the explicate order. From the perspective of the remote viewer, it is possible that the signal line we acquire is mediated by these holospheres, which connects us with an implicate order that is conceptually more or less identical to the Eastern concept of “Akasha” or the “Akashic records,” as articulated in the work of writers such as Swami Vivekananda. The explicate order in which we ordinarily live and move and have our being is “unfolded” from this implicate order and houses the world of ordinary objects and consciousness, which includes what remote viewers known as the liminal, subliminal and subconscious orders.


Bohm’s “implicate order,” he hypothesized, contained sub-quantum variables that were responsible for the alleged “hidden variables” that made quantum phenomena so unpredictable. In this respect, he was not merely engaging in quantum mechanics, but sub-quantum mechanics, which he believed contained the key to understanding how the universe unfolded from a kind of Universal Mind that pervades the entire cosmos at all times. According to this model, data is unfolded from the non-spatiotemporal implicate order, which forms within the explicate order, at which point the explicate order then once again communicates with the implicate order in a way that impacts subsequent unfoldings within the explicate order from the implicate order.

Back in 2006 I worked out the first version of the quantum information model of magick, and as it happens I also used Bohm's "pilot wave" model to explain it. The idea behind pilot waves is that particles at the quantum level do have a determinate position and momentum at any given moment, but they simultaneously exhibit a wave nature that limits our ability to measure them. Think of each particle as a boat traveling through its own wake. Entangled particles are linked together by shared pilot waves that mediate effects like so-called "spooky action at a distance" that is currently used for applications like quantum teleportation.

Entanglement easily explains how contagion links work in magick. Entangled particles occupy the same quantum information field and are therefore connected at the pilot wave level. My model did not include the "holosphere" construction outlined above, but it is possible that Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance works along those lines. That was the piece that I had some trouble working out, and it also is how CRV has to work. None of the remote viewers in the CIA program generally had objects from where they were viewing that would have an entanglement connection. Coordinates seemed to work fine.

Morphic resonance is that last remaining hole in my model, corresponding to similarity links in magick. Holospheres as explained above strike me as a little contrived, to tell you the truth, but I would have to dig into the physics more to understand it better. I'm still fishing around for a good model of how similarity links fit into my quantum information constructions, and maybe this could be it. I do think that magick implies a panpsychist model, in which consciousness (the "universal mind" referenced above) pervades the universe, and so does the success of remote viewing.

The simplest statement of the quantum information model is that quantum information is a property of matter, and consciousness is a property of quantum information. As quantum information is reflected in the wave nature of particles, consciousness is similarly continuous. Magick and remote viewing both invole forming a connection between your field of consciousness to the field of consciousness linked to your target. With remote viewing, you receive information into your field of consciousness and therefore awareness, and with magick you send information to the target. Both of those work because quantum information connections run both ways.

I will say that there is a debate going on between whether mind precedes matter or matter precedes mind when talking about panpsychic models of consciousness. As I see it, the whole debate is silly. Implicate and explicate order, and therefore mind and matter, coexist and are locked into a reciprocal relationship. Neither precedes the other; they arise at the same time and are in a real sense two ways of looking at the same "one taste" that comprises all of reality at the highest levels of spiritual awakening.

I love to see work like this going on, because it shows that we're getting there, with "there" meaning a basic scientific model of magick, psychic abilities, and paranormal processes. I have a whole series on this that I wrote up awhile back on magical models, which is clearly informed by some of what the CIA was looking into and also my own research that happened to proceed along similar lines. You can check that out here and follow the links at the top to the preceding nine articles.

UPDATE: Here is a link to SRI remote viewing protocol used by the CIA for Project Stargate (the remote viewing program described above). Translating this into magical terms, the Targeting phase is accomplished by means of a contagion or similarity link (entanglement/resonance) and the Bit-grabbing phase is replaced by a "Bit-sending" phase in which the desired change is transmitted to the target. Spirits can aid with both the Targeting and Bit-sending phases, but the essential process still works similarly.

For experimentation, it occurs to me that since spirits increase magical effects to a very significant degree, the same might be true for remote viewing. You probably would be calling on a spirit related to divination like Raphael (Air) to (A) make the connection to the target more precise and (B) increase the intensity of accurate information coming back while down-regulating noise. This is a case where you would call the spirit into your own sphere of consciousness ("invocation" in modern terminology) rather than separating yourself from them by means of a containment structure. If spirit work can increase the effectiveness of remote viewing that would be pretty interesting, because without them it already works pretty well for a lot of subjects.