JEFFREY MISHLOVE: Hello. Tonight we have a very special experience in store. My guest, Stephan Schwartz, is one of the world’s experts on the practical applications of psychic abilities. He is the founder of the Mobius Group and in that capacity he has been involved in many projects involving psychic archeology, psychic criminology, healing research. He is the author of The Secret Vaults of Time, one of the foremost books available on the question of psychic archeology, and then he took the principles that he wrote about in that book and applied them to research projects of his own which are described in his next book, The Alexandria Project. Welcome Stephan.

Stephan Schwartz: Welcome to you, Jeffrey.

Mishlove: It’s a pleasure to be with you. As you know I’ve admired your work now for decades so to have the opportunity to share this work with our audience is really exciting to me. I think it might be good to kind of go back to about the time when you had finished your book The Secret Vaults of Time. As I recall it was an appendix to that book where you laid out the methodology for how in today’s era if one wanted to do psychic archeology, how one would go about it and then you did, you followed your own methodology and achieved great success.

Schwartz: Well, you know I got interested in this because I really thought the argument as to whether these extraordinary human capacities existed or not had become a kind of sterile debate in which people screamed at each other across the table but there wasn’t much new. I became intrigued with another question: is there anything practical we can do with these abilities? If we could figure out how to do something practical with them, then we could not only say whether they existed but, also, it would tell us a great deal about who we are and what our real totality as human beings actually is. If you look back through the long history of humankind, you see this recurring theme that there is some part of us that exists outside of time/space and that seems to be linked with a greater whole. I wanted to see whether it was possible to tap into that and then apply it and use it in practical situations.

Originally I had planned to develop an experiment protocol in astronomy. I thought it might be interesting to use intuitively gifted people to find celestial bodies but I when I explored this I discovered it was impractical, for reasons that had nothing to do with the psi aspect of the experiment. People wait for years to get on an instrument and they were very unlikely to give up the precious time that they had to try to do something that seemed sort of outrageous on the face of it.

I settled on archeology because archeology has a lot of trouble knowing where to look, so helping to find things would be useful. If we were successful it would also demonstrate that people did have the capacity to move back thousands of years in time or forward and that they had the ability to bring back very specific testable information. If you ask someone to locate something about which they have no previous knowledge, not even knowing they are going to be asked that question, and they tell you to go three thousand miles away, and to go to a particular tree that they describe, next to a rock that they say looks like an Indian head, and that if you dig down you’ll find a fire pit with arrow heads – well, they’re either right or they’re wrong. I thought that would be a good way to start out.

We’ve been doing it now for almost twenty years and the headline is that it works. . The first book I wrote, The Secret Vaults of Time, was my attempt to try to go back and look at what had been done before.

Mishlove: You started out by looking at historical examples going back into the nineteenth century where there were some dramatic successes in psychic archeology then but, for the most part, had been forgotten by the time you wrote "The Secret Vaults of Time".

Schwartz: Yes, the first one that I could find was a man named Frederick Bligh Bond who was responsible for reconstructing Glastonbury Abbey, one of the great Abbeys of England. It had been destroyed by Henry the Eighth but, at his height, it was essentially a city in itself. Bond was given the job of looking after it. Nobody ever actually thought that you could reconstruct it. Working with a technique called automatic writing to guide his excavations, Bond was able to reconstruct the Abbey.

When he first announced his finds he was greatly lionized, everybody made a tremendous fuss about him, much honor and the like. Then he announced how he had actually done it. Someone asked him how did you know to go out into the middle of the field and dig down to find those walls since it didn’t make any sense. Why would you go out in that particular field and why would you dig in that exact direction? So he then wrote a book, Gates of Remembrance in which he explained that he was doing all of this essentially being guided, he claimed, by some of the monks that had once lived in the Abbey.

As you can imagine, that caused an enormous amount of controversy and the Anglican Church found itself in a very uncomfortable position. Bond was fired, and ended up broken and reduced to cleaning the artifacts that he had once discovered as the director. Today, when you go over to Glastonbury, the only mention of Frederick Bligh Bond to be found is in the museum. They’ve got a model reconstructing what it looked like before it was destroyed. In one corner a little bitty label says something like "model based on Frederick Bligh Bond". Other than that he is completely forgotten.

I think the most moving story though, that I ran across in doing the research for Secret Vaults, was that of a Polish chemical engineer and psychic by the name of Stephan Ossowiecki. It had a strong effect on me, and I think it illustrates some of the very best sort of work that was done in the early years. But even more important than issues of protocol is the dedication with which it was done.

This series of experiments was mostly conducted during the Second World War in occupied Warsaw, at a time when doing such an experiment could literally cost you your life. People were shot for doing research. I found a case of an archeologist who did a dig and the day he was married the Nazi troops broke into the church and took the entire wedding party outside, stood them against the church wall, machine gunned them. It is important to remember that this work was done under tremendous personal risk. The manuscript was lost, Ossowiecki was killed in the uprising of Warsaw, and only years later did a former SS officer offer to sell his papers back to his widow. This included a series of experiments that Ossowiecki did with Professor Stanislaw Poniatowski, then one of Poland’s most prominent scholars. In these experiments, they went back and reconstructed the prehistory of Poland and parts of Europe.

Mishlove: That’s quite remarkable.

Schwartz: It was. They had to break into the museums the Nazis occupation had closed, and that they formerly had run, in order to get the artifacts they needed for their work. Ossowiecki, who was a chemical engineer, and successful in his professional life, by the way, never got any money for this. In fact, that’s one of the things that I have found quite interesting: the people who are particularly good at this sort of practical research are rarely people who fit the model of what we think of when we think of a psychic. These are not people that principally make their living at it or who we think of with crystal balls or as women in purple dresses. Mostly the people that I have worked with and the ones who have done well with this applied research are individuals, men and women, who have successful careers in electrical engineering or fine arts photography or who were best-selling authors, or doctors. Anyway, they are people who are accomplished and confident and who have gotten interested in exploring this aspect of themselves.

Mishlove: Now if I recall correctly, and I could be wrong, wasn’t also the discovery of the City of Troy . . . . .?

Schwartz: Yes, Heinrich Schliemann had a series of dreams that led him to select the site he chose. Where you look is one of the principal problems archeology has always had. Where to look? If you study how discoveries are made, you find that most of them are serendipitous. That is, people are cutting a road and the work crew turns up a site, or a Chinese peasant is digging a well and discovers the buried army whose life-sized statues we all now know about. Or someone putting a fence line in comes across an early man site. That sort of thing. When you talk to archeologists you find that there is a kind of never publicly mentioned, but understood, corridor buzz that some people are just good at locating things. When you ask them how they did it they say, "well I had a hunch". A good example of that was some work done down in Central America.

That enormous head that you see on the tequila ads was found by a man named Clarence Woolsey Weiant, and Matthew Stirling of the Smithsonian Institution. Weiant used a Mayan shaman who led them to all kinds of sites. The work was sponsored by the Smithsonian, published widely, and only years later did Weiant reveal how he had made the location, how he had played a hunch, and trusted an old man. Archeologists, like all people who have to solve a problem that really can’t be solved just by the intellect, learn to be sensitive to that interior signal that alerts you that something else is going on.

Mishlove: Then there was the work of Emerson in Toronto.

Schwartz: Yes, Professor Norman Emerson, who died not too long ago, was one of the founding archeologists and the father of archeology in Canada. Fairly typically, he got into the use of remote perception in archaeology without meaning to. He had had some health problems and his wife became friendly through an Edgar Cayce study group with the wife of a man who was a parts manager at an automobile dealership. He wasn’t having much success with the treatments he was undergoing and George McMullen, the man who was the parts manager, suggested to him some things he might try, and he did, and they worked. That piqued his interest; he began getting interested in how remote perception might contribute, and then later went on to talk about it and use it.

Because he was such a preeminent archeologist in Canada, he provided a kind of umbrella under which a number of his students were able to work, notably a man named Paddy Reid who wrote a master’s thesis on Iroquois Indian sites. In that case McMullen went out into a field where they had been looking for two and one-half years for a site and, in about twenty-five minutes, was able to stake out exactly where the palisade wall (the wooden wall) that was around the village was, as well as locating long houses where the villagers lived. He was able to stake it out, describe how the tribe had lived, and what they had traded with. All of this turned out to be correct. This was all done within a matter of minutes and I think that’s one of the important things about this. Using this kind of information gives you the best case scenario that you can possibly get.

Mishlove: Stephan, we’re about to take a short break. We’ll be back after that and we’ll explore further the wonders of psychic archeology.

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Mishlove: Welcome back to Virtual U. I’m your host, Jeffrey Mishlove, and my guest Stephan Schwartz is the author of The Secret Vaults of Time and The Alexandria Project. If you’d like to speak with us you can call Wisdom’s toll free number: 800- 655-2112 or you can send e-mail to me at virtual@williamjames.com. Williamjames is one word and if we get your e-mail, I’ll read it during our breaks and we’ll read your question following the break. So we were talking about the many interesting cases historically, I think we’ve listed five or six in Poland and England and Canada and Mexico where archeologists themselves have used intuitive processes. The one that really intrigues me is Frederick Bligh Bond. It seemed as if, from what you were saying Stephan, he was actually communicating with the spirit of a monk who had died hundreds of years earlier.

Schwartz: Well, that’s what he said. He drew a picture of him and, of course, we have no absolute way of knowing whether that is in fact what was going on, or whether it was some projection in Bligh Bond’s mind, but clearly he was getting information which was testable by the spade. That’s the beauty of this sort of work. It’s either there or it’s not there. The Abbey, which had been abandoned for hundreds of years and which at that time looked like a series of toppled stone pillars and piers, was mostly out in the middle of a field. Bond was able to find the nave and to find the dimensions of the thing.

For me the most interesting story, and a story that has never been properly explained, is Bond’s account of how the monks told him about a burial in an area where one would normally never have looked. When Bond did look, he found this enormous skeleton in a lead sarcophagus. We still don’t know who this man was except that in an age when the average height was about 5'-2" or 5'-3", this man was about 6'-4". He must have been a very startling person when he was in life. Bligh Bond felt and said that they were able to find it because the monks told them exactly where they had buried him. We can’t say with certitude, of course, that the monks actually were speaking to him although we have no evidence that couldn’t be possible. But what we do absolutely know is that he found things which nobody else had been able to find, and which you could not have found in any other way. There wasn’t any book you could go read or nobody living could have told you. This was pure triple blind work, which is one of the nice things about it. Nobody knew this information. Only excavation would reveal whether it was accurate or not.

The sad thing, of course, is that after being lionized for the work that he had done, when Bond revealed how he had achieved his results, he was fired and he ended up cleaning artifacts that he had previously found as the director of excavation. He could never get another job. So it ended quite tragically.

Mishlove: Well, it’s been a real struggle I think throughout the entire nineteenth and twentieth centuries to take this kind of data and bring it to the light of day in the context of a very materialistic scientific culture that didn’t seem to have room for these sorts of processes.

Schwartz: Well yes, I think what happens is that one of the great glories of the human mind is the scientific method and it has given us enormous benefits. Unfortunately, when science was first developing a split occurred, I think partly so that the church would not be threatened. It was a split in which the spirit got lost in science. Although a lot of scientists have felt otherwise I think it’s very interesting that your e-mail address is William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, which is one of the great books that cover this whole area of consciousness.

Although individual scientists have felt this way, as a group, as a body, science has always been very uncomfortable with spirit. Accepting this implies that some part of us exists outside of time and space, and that there’s a level of interconnectedness between us (I personally think between all living forms) that doesn’t seem to be governed by the rules as we know them. And so science has been very resistant to this. Yet, if you go back and look at how scientists have breakthroughs, you find them over and over again describing experiences where, in a moment’s flash of intuition, they have an insight which clearly sounds exactly like the kind of remote viewing research that those of us who have been doing parapsychological research have been seeing for years. By not accepting the this aspect of ourselves, we have lost something.

In the future, in the twenty-first century, we’re going to see a much greater emphasis on this in many different disciplines. If you look just at the healing research that’s going on, we now see pretty conclusively the effect of the consciousness with which an individual gives a drug. For instance, we have studies that show in placebo research that the consciousness with which the physician who gives a drug, whether it’s a drug or a placebo he doesn’t know, his or her level of belief in that medication will produce a result in the patients, even those patients who get placebos. So clearly there’s some type of linkage we need to be aware of.

Mishlove: There are many different lines of evidence and I’m glad you mentioned the term "remote viewing" because when we come back from our break, we’ll get into your own research in this area applying remote viewing.

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Mishlove: An idea ahead of its time.

Schwartz: Yes, perhaps. I think that that is probably true but in spite of it we have produced twenty-three papers on this approach, and presented them at conferences all over the country, all over the world actually, and I’m now putting them together in a new book. These are all experiments that have been exhaustingly documented. All of them have been evaluated by independent experts who were authorities in the particular areas we were working. They have been able to tell us not just saying whether it worked or it didn’t work, but have broken it down concept by concept and given us a rating on each concept. If you say "two men having a conversation on a radio program", that’s only one sentence. But if you think of it in terms of concepts, it’s two men, conversation, and radio, so you’ve got a series of concepts in that one sentence and we rate every single concept.

We typically expect to see that about fifty percent of the material can’t be evaluated. That is, the remote viewers give us information that there’s no way to test, for instance the state of mind of a person when they were dying. But of the other fifty percent that can be evaluated, between seventy-five and eighty-five percent of it will be evaluated correct or partially correct. I would tell you, and I’m willing to back this up with the research itself, that if you only have one way to look for something, you can’t beat remote viewing.

Mishlove: That’s a very strong statement, Stephan. I think it might useful when we come back from the break to share with our listeners some of the procedures so that they can begin to experiment for themselves with this remarkable technique.

Schwartz: Okay.

Mishlove: We’ll be back in a few minutes.

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