Mansions of the Mind

I have long recognized that when I dream of houses, I am really dreaming about my mind.   More specifically, if I dream of attics, I am dreaming about my intellect or brain.  If I am dreaming about basements, I am dreaming about my physical body, sexual parts or root chakra.  The "house" is a symbol of me.  Many times I dream about "returning" to houses I have never seen before.  Other times, I return "home" to an apartment that feels unnaturally familiar.  As though I lived there - or perhaps desired to live there - and discover them in my dream.  Very often, as someone who lived in Manhattan for nearly 25 years, I return to my "home" in New York. 

Last night I dreamt that my husband and I went apartment-hunting in Manhattan.  I don't recall what section of town, but the real estate agent brought us to an elegant, upscale apartment.  It could not have been more gorgeous.  The kitchen had marble counters, modern appliances, gourmet amenities.  The living room, fully furnished by the wealthy current owners, was sleek, modern, and filled with beautiful artwork.  As we wandered down the long winding hallways, the real estate agent brought us to a large picture window with a spectacular view of the East River.  The apartment was strangely whimsical.  The architectural contained colorful curiosities like carved wooden swirls on the doors and multi-colored ceiling beams.  My husband was sold on the apartment.  He was ready to buy it.  So was I.  Amazingly, the price was affordable.  It was only a quarter of a million dollars.  A bargain in New York City!

We all walked back to the front door and the kitchen, and my husband exited my dream.  I stood there with the broker and began to have second thoughts. 

"Wait a minute," I mused out loud. "There is only one bedroom in this apartment.  I think we might need at least one more bedroom as a guest room or study." 

"Oh, didn't you notice?" she asked.  "There are plenty of other bedrooms."

Well, no, in fact, I hadn't noticed.  I hadn't seen any other bedrooms on our little tour.  I decided to do another walk-through of the apartment, but this time I hyper-focused on all of the minute details of the apartment.  This is where it became very strange.

As we walked through the gorgeous kitchen, dining room, and living room, we made our way back to the bedroom area of the apartment.  This time, I noticed that the floors were bare planks of wood with giant cracks in between - sometimes we had to hop over large crevices in the floor.  Many of the walls were unfinished.  Closets were either non-existent or barely framed out with 2 x 4 wooden beams.  The ceilings were now two or three stories tall and had peeling paint and broken sheetrock.  What the heck?   Yes, the broker was correct in telling me this was not just a one-bedroom apartment, because now I saw there were tiny bedrooms off of every hallway!  The problem was that they were all dark, dusty, and under construction!

As I wandered on my own throughout the long hallways, the size of the apartment began to morph - Alice in Wonderland style.  The apartment was now the size of an entire building. The ceilings had expanded and were now at least 7 or 8 stories tall.  The girth of the apartment was now several acres.  The apartment had lost its luxury gloss and was now was disturbingly unfinished - it was under construction and clearly unsafe.  I spotted a half-hidden doorway leading to an unnaturally narrow staircase into the bowels of some basement.  I called to the real estate agent and asked her where this led.  I did not want to buy an apartment if it could be accessed for deliveries by other people or was unsafe.  She didn't know.  Then I looked up and saw the 80-foot tall walls and ceilings were actually a giant parking lot containing cars.  I just couldn't reconcile this with my idea of a luxury apartment.  Car oil might drip on us!  Cars might fall on us from the ceiling.  Why hadn't the previous owner taken the time to cover up all this functionality?   It wasn't pretty. How was I going to ever finish working on this apartment to make it presentable?

My dream ended because the telephone rang.

Clearly, my dream was about my feelings about my mind.  Due to all my research studies and work in the psychic field, I felt - at least initially - that I must have a super-toned and luxurious brain.  I was clearly proud of my brain.  I was ready to "buy" in to it!    The initial luxury brain had come at virtually "no cost" to me.  However, upon closer examination, I discovered my mind was only a work in progress - and not a display home.  I was disappointed because I couldn't showcase my brain, but on the other hand, I was amazed to discover that my brain is much, much larger than I ever imagined.  With enough work invested in its "construction," I can clearly build a far more amazing mind than even I ever imagined!

The moral of this story:  The real estate of the mind is always a work in progress.

The Male/Female Aspects of Remote Viewing

Paul Smith, former military remote viewer and vice president of the International Remote Viewing Association (IRVA), delivering a tribute to Ingo Swann

 

 

Many years ago, when I  was just starting out my journey to explore psychic intuition, I interviewed a well known psychic.  She was associated with Edgar Cayce's Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) in Virginia Beach.  I was secretly terrified of my inadequacies in the psychic realm and was concerned I wouldn't be able to understand her or that she would see through me.   

 

We sat down over a brief lunch.  She was a heavy-set woman, as many psychic women tend to be, and she had the tell-tale eyes of a psychic.  Difficult for me to explain - but in the words of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous attempt to define obscenity in a 1964 case: "I know it when I see it."   I knew she had psychic eyes.  They were clear sparkling blue, heavy-lidded, dangerous, glittering like a snake's eyes, outlined, ancient Egyptian-style with black eye liner.  They weren't quite looking at me, perhaps through me, and they lacked focus on my physical body.   

 

She said, " Maybe someday people will come to respect our work in the psychic field.  I'm betting that remote viewing is going to make that happen."

 

"Why do you say that?" I asked.

 

"I think remote viewing will gain acceptance because it is primarily done by men," she said.

 

I never forgot that.  She was right. 

 

Remote viewing is, by my own personal definition, a form of "Militarized Clairvoyance."  It has traditionally fallen into the realm of men.  It was created, largely in part by my former mentor Ingo Swann, as a method to formalize ways to mind read and access psychic information.  Since the methodologies were created for the CIA, and subsequently different branches of the military and DIA.  Remote viewing was used as a tool by which to train mostly military men to spy on our enemies in other countries. 

 

The fact that remote viewing was created as a military tool was interesting.  Traditionally more women have been deemed to be clairvoyant than men.  Psychic abilities are generally more accepted among women than among men.  By structuring clairvoyance as a new kind of military intelligence tool and reformulating its essence into a series of rigid protocols, guidelines and rules, remote viewing became more acceptable to men.  Women never used their clairvoyance as a "tool" in the past.  The only "application" ever promoted by women for their psychic abilities was generally in the healing realm.  

 

And so, it was very interesting to me, as a newcomer - and guest speaker - to the International Remote Viewing Association's ("IRVA") annual conference (June 27-29, 2014) , to assess the masculine and feminine qualities of the experience.  My overall sense of the organization was heavily masculine. The military influence is palpable.  However, the new president of the organization, psychic detective Pamela Coronado, is a woman, and there are a growing number of women on the board of directors.  There were also a fair number of women in the audience. 

 

To me, this equalization of the sexes, is indicative of the growing acceptance of clairvoyance.  It reminds me, by analogy, of my early days at Princeton University when I was accepted into the fifth class of women ever to attend the university.  Life was strange for a woman because there were so few of us.  To give you an idea, the first class of women was only 25 women!  You had to walk a long distance to find a ladies' room, half  of the eating clubs were all-male, and girls were still bussed in from neighboring colleges for dates.  Today, the bathrooms are uni-sex, the eating clubs are all coed, and 49 percent of the student body is now female.  The feminine component is now fully integrated and Princeton has normalized.

 

The IRVA presentations had an obvious "male" character to them.  They focused on analysis, statistics, mathematical formulas, research study results and military games.  And so when I made my presentation - which was very different from the rest - I was a bit nervous.  My presentation, titled "The Myth of the Sixth Sense," contained colorful images, flowers, whimsical drawings and fun facts.  I had an entire section devoted to explaining the reality of women's intuition.  I secretly feared my presentation would not be respected since it was lacking in dry methodology and statistics, 

 

I was very pleased when, at the end, many men and women (military and non-military)came up to me to personally thank me for my presentation.  They said it was refreshing to have more of a woman's perspective in the field.  They said my presentation helped them understand clairvoyance, the underpinning of remote viewing, from a new vantage point, and not just as a mysterious set of strict protocols.

 

To me, this was the highlight of my trip.  I was able to inject my feminine perspective into the field created and founded by Ingo - who certainly understood the value of masculine and feminine attributes - and who managed to reformulate a type of clairvoyance that could be seen as acceptable to both men and women.