IN SEARCH OF THE TRIBES OF WOO
"The lips of Wisdom are closed, except to the ears of Understanding.”
― Three Initiates, Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece"
PREVIOUSLY ON RATIONAL MYSTIC
In my previous post, I covered how I stumbled head-long into remote viewing, learned that clairvoyance and precognition are real, and had my personal conceptions of time kick-downed, flipped over, and blown into oblivion. If you haven't read that post it might be good to start there to contextualize this one.
In this post, I will talk about my efforts to find and have conversation with individuals who had already mapped some of contours of the "rabbit hole" -- or the "woo" as the folks who delve into these topics often lightheartedly refer to subjects at the edge of our current human understanding.
Brief Anthropology Of The Woo Tribes
I grew up in a rather rural part of the United States. All the roads that led to my house were dirt roads, the nearest department store was about an hour away, and when the occasional ice storm would blow in for the winter we'd lose our power for weeks. While I was missing out on urban cultural assets likes museums, libraries, or sporting centers, my own learning and enrichment environment was constituted in vast networks of adjoining pine woods, deep creek beds, and winding game trails. As such, one of my favorite childhood past-times was venturing out often alone into places I wasn't supposed to be. There were mountains to climb, hidden marijuana farms to reconnoiter, packs of feral dogs to outrun, and the occasional collapsed farm house to be excavated for "relics". It was a fun childhood in as far as I survived it.
While roaming the wild places, I was always trying to map out new paths within a radius of how far I could venture out and still return home before nightfall. My drive for exploring new locations would regularly lead me into challenging terrain and situations. It was in those moments of not knowing exactly where I was, that the vibrant feeling of personal adventure would be joined with a deep realization of my very real isolation. My childhood treks showed me that the desire to seek out company often became the strongest when I had no clear idea on how to press forward or to return home.
In the not so distant past, finding a "tribe" of individuals who had already traveled the wild trails of clairvoyance and precognition was by all accounts an arcane undertaking full of initiation rites, trials, elaborate rituals, and secret handshakes. However, in the internet age, you basically just go to Reddit and/or Youtube and search for "remote viewing" or other semi-esoteric topics and there you go -- problem solved. These groups, much like the topics they gravitate around, are rather hidden in plain sight. However, the odd truth is that you have to have a reason to seek them out to start with -- and also importantly some measure of shared experience to relate to the information they are more than willing to share. It is interesting how in this manner some topics become "self protecting secrets" where their very nature conceals them irrespective of their broad availability.
The individuals and groups that I connected with based on those searches, were very bright , invariably kind, and intriguingly often 'cut from a different cloth'. If you are someone who likes to occasionally people watch in public settings, you know that part of the fun is coming up with some outlandish backstories for the individuals passing by. However, in the remote viewing and other woo tribes, it seemed like the uncommon was rather common. In these groups and 'woo social networks', I came across former software engineers turned occultists, AI experts running collaborative remote viewing projects, rap musicians doing precog. financial market predictions. I met retired Hawaiian school teachers who had become community shamans, hermeticists who looked at PSI development from a desire to follow the path of the Buddha, EMTs who worked as tibetan sorcerers in their spare time, christian youth counselors who help find missing persons using only their mind, venture capitalists lighting beacon fires in the form of edge topic videos in order to have group "idea sex" (you really can't make this shit up). The amalgam of individuals that I was coming across was beyond dizzying. The diverse backgrounds of the woo tribe members was almost as stunning to me as coming to realize that clairvoyance and precognition were real.
While the backgrounds, professions, and spiritual beliefs of these individuals was considerably varied -- some common threads that bound them together was their strong rational intellect, their overwhelming curiosity, but also very interestingly their creativity. A great number of these individuals had distinctive artistic inclination or interests including visual arts, music, or writing/performance. (On my own account - I admittedly occasionally like to write something like blues songs). They were also extremely communal in some interesting ways; Books, videos, and resource links were shared with me to both explain topics/methodologies but also in some cases just to unearth interesting questions with yet no answers. Whereas in some professions or practices, I am very used to finding individuals hoarding knowledge from others to keep their methods secret, within the civilian "woo tribes", sharing new methods and experiments to help others was a fairly regular and ostensible practice.
In my own pursuit of sharing ideas and personal experiences, more than a few individuals were also willing to jump on video or voice calls to talk about their own encounters at the edge -- including not only remote viewing but topics like out-of-body experiences, precognitive dreams, and other related matters. They also often related how they had struggled (often painfully) to integrate these powerful subjective experiences into their own lives. As I listened closely to their stories and backgrounds, there was an emerging picture of a whole class of suppressed narratives in predominantly modern western societies
regarding aspects of psychic functioning that are still not readily accepted. It was becoming clear to me that just beneath the shadow of materialism, there is a vast trove of suppressed stories regarding the experiences of rational individuals that do not conform with the conventional picture of how our world works or perhaps even who we as human beings really are. Intriguingly, these experiences were not disjointed but in many instances seemed to suggest common themes of shared experience assembled in a type of wheel with psychic functioning being at the central hub.
In observing the interactions in these communities, I also quickly began to realize these groups function not only as "practitioners guilds" where tools of the clairvoyant trade are exchanged to help everyone get better, but also as extremely weird support groups. For individuals navigating the epistemic shock of discovering that reality may be much stranger than we were ever taught in school, these groups acted as counselors, consolers, and compatriots. Having individuals listen to you earnestly, not prejudge you immediately as bereft of reason, and then be open enough to share their own narratives and experiences, was a grace that I will never forget. This experience lends itself to a "pay it forward" attitude where your own memory of how other helped you, lends to wanting to repay that kindness by assisting others in dealing with the discomfort of full recognition of psychic functioning as a reality.
I should also mention that while viewing the positive aspects of the communities that I have mentioned above. I was also made aware of groups whose encounters with the reality and utility of remote viewing, had seemingly blown off all the doors of skepticism all together . These groups seemed to have embraced a form of rampant credulity by considering that all information derived from remote viewing or other psychic function as intrinsically true. This is an important cautionary point. Psychic functioning is in some odd way deeply creative and imaginal, while still bearing correlation to real world facts, future events, and verifiable phenomenon. However it is no way always perfect and there is always "noise", and in some cases the results of psychic activity can also evidently reveal interesting creative works of our subconscious versus factual information. This is often most relevant when a psychic does work for which there is no feedback provided to either validate or invalidate the data they obtain. While the mechanisms behind psychic phenomenon remain unknown to us, we must be very cautious to not try to solve a number of mysteries with yet another mystery.
Modern Operational Psychic Work and The Possibility Of A Psychic Renaissance
By having these discussions with individuals involved in varied forms of psychic practices, I began also to have an appreciation for how some of them were using these abilities for "operational work". By operational work, I mean rather than just running tests and trials to use clairvoyance to describe a "test target" (represented often by a random location, event, or person) these individuals were using clairvoyance and precognition in service to try to help others in some appreciable ways. While remote viewing has its origin in the discipline of intelligence collection, it has since expanded to include a broad array of supportive uses including law enforcement, missing persons searches, medical diagnosis, archaeology, market predictions, and innovation support to name just a few. It was also very surprising for me to not only hear about but directly witness some of the successes found in these practices. It has honestly been the cases that psychic assistance has been a determinant factor in a number of public issues that have never made the news or headlines. It has been a silent partner to real world issues for some matter of time unbeknownst to the public, and the many accomplishments of this work still to this day remain hidden from us.
When you fully realize that psychic function is real and that these operational practices continue,
you begin to understand that historical human cultural roles of Oracles, Shamans, and the like were not merely cultural artifacts attributed to 'magical thinking", but that at least some of individuals fulfilling these roles were periodically bringing forward valuable intuitive information to the individuals they were serving.
In our modern age, we've lost social acceptance, recognition, and appreciation of the roles that many of these individuals played providing insight, advice, and guidance. We have also abandoned cultural aspects in our modern cultures of identifying children who may have a unique gift for psychical work and most often do not attempt to train and guide them in developing these abilities in a positive and supportive way. In this way, we are losing the ability to help develop and provide another often very unique channel of information regarding important issues versus those just those obtained from normal senses even when augmented by our incredible technical advancements.
This was one of my major key takeaways while engaging fellow members of the "woo tribes". Several of these individuals encountered seemingly psychic related phenomena as a child but had no viable route to apply or understand those experiences. This was also the case for me as a child growing up. For me as an adult, the realization of the legitimacy of psychic function, was a sudden unexpected demolition of years of largely unrecognized mental effort to suppress these experiences or write them off as "just odd". The pressure to conform and fit in with our society at large is an overwhelmingly powerful force, and as we have deprecated both the existence and legitimate value of psychic function from our social order -- we have also deprived ourselves of the broader use of these real abilities to help humanity at large.
Ingo Swann, an intuitive, artist, author, and creator of the SRI Controlled Remote Viewing methodology, envisioned in his book Psychic Literacy the emergence of a type of "Psychic Renaissance". Like most historical renaissances, this event is imagined as a rebirth and revival often of something that has been lost to us. Ingo predicted this renaissance as taking place while "psychic literacy" (akin conceptually to scientific literacy) was growing among the public -- particularly as we approached a time where humanity faced existential crises whose scope and complexity compelled us to use every tool available to us to aid in our survival. It is unsurprisingly that once again Ingo seems prescient. While there is no utopia (literally in Greek "nowhere"), it is my firm conviction that we should however regard how we might reach a future more fully aligned with important shared aspects of our human spirit. It is interesting to envision a future where our shared psychic abilities are not shunned but cultivated, where greater scientific study of PSI phenomenon is funded appropriately as a matter of significant public interest and benefit, and that the age old roles of psychic counselors are again woven meaningfully into modern social structures in pragmatic ways that are not debased by superstition.
There is no clear way forward but there is also no way to go back home. Temerity does not gain us anything at this point based on the stakes, but the spirit of adventure to find new paths amid the less traveled areas of our human understanding may as yet lead us still to some unexpected and critical discoveries as we face the approaching decades as the human tribe together.
A quick post-script: I would be beyond remiss to not mention that in my own estimation, the positive spirit that I have related regarding many remote viewing online groups owes a great deal of debt to the personal character of Daz Smith. If you aren't familiar with remote viewing, you'll likely have not heard of Daz --but for many of us who started down the path of learning about remote viewing in earnest -- Daz's work as a remote viewing historian, community leader, and practitioner
stands as an amazing example of what it means to seek to further a practice and see others do well. His site remoteviewed.com is an amazing resource for everyone interested in remote viewing.
SUMMARY + KEY POINTS FOR PART 2
The Community Of Civilian Remote Viewers Is Supportive, Diverse and Inclusive
These Communities Are Full of Accomplished Professionals Many With Their Owns Stories Regarding Experiences That Are Often Shunned By Materialist Paradigms
Many Individuals Are Using Remote Viewing Or Other Psychic Functions In Surprising And Important Ways That Are Often Hidden From Sight
Navigating The Existential Challenges That Humanity Currently Faces Would Seem To Involve Bringing All Our Skills And Potential To Bear -- Including Notably Our Psychic Abilities
COMING UP IN PART 3
Does Remote Viewing Change You?
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