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Puthoff and Russell Targ.32 One experiment grew into several and over the next three years I would often spend several days each week in their engineering laboratory where, for several hours at a time, I was engaged in both formal and informal experiments. Results from the formal, rigorously controlled experiments have been reported in some of the most prestigious science and engineering journals in the world.33 After the success of the early years, the psi research became a secret project of the CIA and I chose to drop out because of ethical considerations—I did not want to contribute to an exploration of the potential for psychic warfare. Many years later, I learned that the CIA continued to fund this research for two more decades.34

As mentioned earlier, during the time I was intensely involved with the psychic research, I was also deeply involved with meditation, primarily Buddhist approaches to mindfulness and concentration. With powerful synergy, the combination of intense meditation and feedback from impartial scientific experiments gave me useful tools for learning about the ecology of consciousness.

To illustrate our capacity for intuitive knowing, I’d like to return to remote viewing and briefly describe a series of controlled experiments in which I was involved. In practical terms, the procedure for testing “seeing at a distance” was of stark simplicity. I was locked in a bare room with a pad of paper, a pencil, and a tape recorder and then asked, after waiting half an hour for the travel time of my colleague, to describe the area surrounding the location of the outbound experimenter. The target person was someone I knew well, so I could intuitively connect with them. After my door was locked, the destination of the outbound person was selected by another scientist (not otherwise involved in the experiment) by drawing an envelope at random from a locked safe that contained more than a hundred possible locations. My task was to describe in words and drawings the location of the distant person. Was he on a boat in the bay? In a car on the freeway? In a grove of redwood trees? In a movie theater? In the room next door? My only instructions were, “Take a deep breath, close your eyes, and tell us what you see.” Although impressions were subtle and fleeting, I gradually learned that we all have an intuitive ability to “see” at a distance. Through our intuition, each of us can acquire useful impressions, images, and insights about a distant person or place. In my experience and that of other subjects, the descriptions were sufficiently accurate to be matched with the actual locations to a statistically significant degree.35

Instead of an unusual capacity accessible to only a special few, I think remote viewing—using our intuitive capacities to connect with the world at a distance—is a universally accessible capacity. Our perceptions may be momentary, but they can still contain accurate and useful information. With practice, we can extend our consciousness, “tune in” to the larger world, and receive impressions that, while fleeting and sketchy, still have a measure of accuracy. Many people already recognize our inborn capacity for intuitive knowing. As mentioned in Chapter 1, national surveys in the United States indicate that two-thirds or more of the adult population report having some kind of extrasensory or intuitive experience.

I was also involved with another set of psychic experiments that explored the “sending” aspects of consciousness, or the potential to interact with matter via our intuitive faculties, which is sometimes called psychokinesis. To explore the sending, or expressive, aspect of consciousness, SRI researchers assembled instruments from one of the finest engineering and research laboratories in the world. A range of experimental apparatus was set up for me to interact with, and learn from, over a period of several years. In one experiment, I was able to move a clock pendulum, sitting at rest, while a laser beam registered and recorded the movement on a strip-chart recorder. In a second experiment,