The Dark Night of the Soul

You’ve been a remote viewer for several years… or perhaps only months. But you’ve really been working hard at it, sacrificing time at the office or with family, to practice. Up until now, your enthusiasm and fascination with remote viewing seemed boundless.

Then suddenly, you hit a wall. It now feels pointless. “What was this, an expensive hobby? Am I just going to throw it all away?” you wonder. The very thought of doing another practice session throws you into a tailspin.

Believe it or not, this pivotal moment is when you finally start to “get it.” Although your emotions tell you “You’re done, this is it, no more”… the fact is that by studying remote viewing, especially Controlled Remote Viewing, you have opened a door to the subconscious mind.

Several religious traditions refer to “the dark night of the soul” that one must pass through before entering the presence of God. Many people who have clinically “died,” speak of passing through a dark tunnel with a light at the end of it, before arriving at a wondrous heaven. In other words, if you don’t go through the darkness, you cannot find the light.

Trungpa Rinpoche, known for bringing Buddhism to the West in a simple, easy to understand way, taught that when students have become completely frustrated in their struggles toward enlightenment, when their meditation and mindfulness practice has brought them to the point of giving up and they are considering abandoning the whole path… that is precisely the point where the real journey of awakening begins.

The same is true for students of remote viewing.

Distractions and The Ego Mind

We now know that the conscious mind, our ego, is really only about .0001 percent of our total consciousness. The other 99.9999 percent is rumbling about underneath the hood of our awareness.

So even though your ego-mind/conscious mind wants to be done with this frustrating practice, your subconscious mind is finally getting to have a say. So naturally, the ego-mind wants to shut it all down.

But no matter how much you try, you won’t be able to shut it down. You can put away your pen and paper, but your subconscious mind has now developed myriad ways to communicate with you.

Our lives are full of distractions. And any time we want to run away from reality, we can do so by simply adding more distractions. We can check our phones a thousand times a day, look at email, post on Facebook and Twitter. Depending on where we live, colorful blaring screens surround us -- in shopping malls, bars, restaurants, and even billboards! We can’t get away from them.

Even if you decided to shave your head and join a monastery, you would still find distractions everywhere. When you rid yourself of external distractions, the internal distractions begin.

The question is… why do we distract ourselves so intensely?

The answer is because our ego-mind is threatened by silence. We often fear coming face-to-face with ourselves. Why would that be? What is so frightening about our true “self” that would make meeting it an experience to avoid?

Perception and Meaning

Your current “self” is made up of layers upon layers of life experience. Each experience, from your birth to your death, is recorded in finite detail within the subconscious mind. And each experience is recorded from the perspective of the “you” who perceived it. So when you were unjustly sent to your room or spanked at the age of 6, your 6-year old self remembers it just as it was perceived back then.

This reminds me of a man who came to see me for hypnosis many years ago. “I want to remember some things from my childhood,” he said. “I remember having to walk by a very scary house where a very scary old man lived. I want to be sure he didn’t hurt me in any way.” Under hypnosis, he became a 7-year old boy again, playing sandlot baseball with his friends.

When it was time for him to walk home, past the scary house, I suggested to the client that he was now his current age, 56 years old. As he walked past the house, I asked him to describe it to me. He seemed surprised. “It isn’t scary at all! It is simply in the shadow of several large trees that surround it. And I see the man coming out of the house!”

At this point, my client began to laugh. “He isn’t old at all! He looks like he might be around 40 years old.” His perspective as a 56-year-old man was very different from the way his 7-year old self perceived things. And happily, he discovered that the 40-year old man was actually a kind person who had never hurt him in any way.

The memory of the “scary” house and the “scary old man” had lurked in the back of his mind for nearly 50 years, until he decided to take the bull by the horns and face the fear by examining the memory under hypnosis.

Hidden Meaning

When guided by a well-trained and skillful hypnotherapist, hypnosis can be a safe way to explore the subconscious.

But as a Remote Viewer (particularly a Controlled Remote Viewer) you find that while practicing, you are exploring your subconscious alone in your room, day after day.

During practice sessions, there is no life at stake, no crucial deadline to meet. The session is simply practice, which gives the subconscious an opportunity to express itself. Sometimes, a viewer wonders what happened in session, and why some of the perceptions were so strange or so off-target.

Upon examination in post-session analysis, the connection between seemingly random perceptions and events from the viewer’s past, for example, can become apparent. In other words, “random” perceptions are often personal messages from the subconscious to the viewer’s conscious mind.

Be Your Own Best Friend

After 21 years immersed in the wonder that is remote viewing, if there were anything I could pass on to new viewers, it would be this: You don’t have to suffer forever, berating yourself and feeling that you are not good enough. To reach a friendship between conscious and subconscious much more quickly, realize this: No session is ever “bad.”

As you practice, remember that each and every session is a gift, full of meaning from the subconscious mind. Yes, there is often a tug of war -- or better yet, a struggle for dominance – as the conscious and subconscious get to know each other. But the struggle is not an epic battle. It is merely two siblings fighting over a pillow. Deep down, the siblings love each other. They know they need each other. And as they mature, the squabbles die down and the love that was always there emerges.

Each time you burst through an uncomfortable phase in your remote viewing path, know the friendship between the two siblings becomes more firmly established. You will be able to trust the information you get from the subconscious with greater confidence.

When you get something “wrong” in a session, you will often discover that the “wrong” perception was “right” at its core; you simply misinterpreted the meaning that the subconscious mind was attempting to convey. And that is ok. You don’t have to be perfect.

Remember that your conscious and subconscious minds are two friends from different worlds, speaking different languages. But over time, like any friends from different worlds, they learn to communicate better and better. They get to know each other’s personalities, beliefs, aversions, desires, fears, and quirks. This precious and hard-earned knowledge will guide you through every other aspect of your life.

The time and money you have invested learning to remote view is not wasted. The practice of Controlled Remote Viewing provides a unique path to self-realization that is unparalleled. Whether you use it to help find missing people, work with archeologists to uncover great hidden mysteries of the past, view the dawn of time, or assist your friends – each time you do it, you learn something new about yourself. And that is precious.

So if you are discouraged and thinking that now you must quit, remember Trungpa Rinpoche. This “dark night of the soul” is when everything you’ve learned can become alive to you. This is when you will discover yourself in a deep, meaningful way.

And as you push through this lethargic phase (which can feel like trying to swim in thick molasses) know that you will burst through it. You will come to the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. There, you will meet a wonderful person: You.