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VIRTUAL U Radio Interview with
Stephan A. Schwartz |
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Welcome back to Virtual U, the radio program with self-exploration, where the focus is on our capacity to live consciously and fully, integrating the wisdom of the spirit with practical affairs of science, business, and culture. Virtual U, presented by WisdomRadio, and now your host, Jeffrey Mishlove. Mishlove: Welcome back to the second hour of my discussion on the practical applications of psychic functioning, remote viewing, and clairvoyance. My guest is Stephan Schwartz, author of The Secret Vaults of Time and The Alexandria Project, founder of the Mobius Group. During the first hour we’ve talked quite a bit about the history of psychic archeology and about Stephan’s own developments in this area leading up to what is know as Project Deep Quest, a remote viewing experiment that took place in a submarine off the coast of southern California. You’re next big project, Stephan, as I recall was the Alexandria Project, where you took a team of remote viewers into Egypt and began to look for undiscovered sites off of the harbor of the city of Alexandria. Schwartz: Well, not only in the harbor but also on land -- it was both a marine and land project. We were looking for things that related to Alexander the Great, his tomb which I think we have located, and I also think we know where his bones are. In the harbor, we located the palace of Cleopatra and Marc Antony, remains of the Lighthouse of Pharos --one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. In what had once been a nearby city of Marea -- now entirely buried along the shores of Lake Mariotus. This was a pleasure city to which Marc Antony, Cleopatra, and Caesar all went for their leisure. We were looking for a buried building along the shores. The work was done in several phases over the course of two years. In the first part of it, we a researcher team from five different universities and institutions worked with eleven remote viewers. In the second part, it was nine remote viewers. We took two remote viewers, Hella Hammid and George McMullen, into the field to fine tune the locations. In this way we were able in the harbor to locate Marc Antony’s palace – the Timonium. The Ptolemaic palace complex lies nearby. It was the home of Cleopatra, who was actually the seventh member of the family to bear that name, as well as the last of the Ptolemies. Egypt for three hundred years belonged as the personal property of one family, the Ptolemies, and Cleopatra was the last of them. Also the remnants of the Lighthouse of Pharos, which were quite extraordinary. It’s an amazing thing to be diving in the water and come across the remains of a palace and to realize that some of the most extraordinary personages from history once lived there and loved there. That’s where Marc Antony fell on his sword and then was taken to Cleopatra who had locked herself in her palace and they died together. It was just an astonishing experience to be swimming across the tops of these ruins and to recognize that this had once been going on. Mishlove: How was it that the ruins came to be under water? Schwartz: Well, for reasons that are not altogether clear, the top of Africa that fronts on the Mediterranean has been sinking. They think part of it has to do with the shifting of the continental plates. There is another argument that the enormous amounts of soil which are brought down by the Nile, which empties out nearby into the ocean, just the sheer weight of all that dirt over millennia has pressed down the Tectonic plate. Whatever the reason, the shoreline has subsided as much as thirty feet. One of the most important things we discovered, from an archeological point of view, was not a palace or anything like that associated with a particular person, but the ancient sea wall where the old harbor used to be. Although Alexandria is a city that is thousands of years old, when we began our work no one was very clear about exactly where the old city ended, and exactly how far out into the sea it extended. Using remote viewing we were able to discover that the ancient sea wall was about sixty-five meters further out into the sea than was previously thought. What was intriguing in the harbor particularly, Jeffrey, was that we compared the remote viewing with an electronic survey technique called side-scan sonar. This is an electronic instrument that sends out sound, and then measures it on the rebound. You get a kind of profile that looks a lot like what you get if you put a piece of paper over a penny and then rub a lead pencil over it -- a kind of a blurry outline. What was intriguing was that the electronic instrument was not able to locate these sites but the remote viewers were. And when you think that they had done these locations before we ever got to Egypt -- done them from Canada and New York and Los Angeles – well, I was impressed. These were people who had never been to Alexandria, they didn’t know anything about this, didn’t even know they were going to be asked questions on this subject, and yet they were able to give us locations down to a matter of feet that were far more detailed than anything even the most advanced scientific instrumentation was able to provide. Mishlove: And you were able to document all of this on film and also publish it in scientific journals. Schwartz: Yes, I presented it originally at the Underwater Archeology Conference, and then subsequently at another conference at The de Young Museum, and then at the American Anthropology Association, and also at the Parapsychology Association. It became a series of papers. For me personally I will tell you I think one of the most extraordinary things I have ever witnessed, and I’ve seen a fair number of extraordinary things in thirty years of doing research, was taking George McMullen, a man with an eighth grade education, out to the edge of a desert, and I mean we’re talking desert here, and saying to him, "George, somewhere within fifteen hundred square kilometers of where we are now standing there was once a buried city. I would like you to find for me first the city and, then, a particular building, and I would like you to actually put stakes in the ground showing me precisely where the corners of the building are." And he walked off into the desert and he did that. And we filmed it. He and Hella were not only able to describe the location of the building but they were able to describe how deep it was buried. They said we would find it between four and six feet. We found it at five feet. They described who built the building, what we would find there, the particular kind of tile floor, and specific artifacts that were inside of the building. What was intriguing again was just the year before researchers from the University of Guelph in Canada had been over and had done an electronic survey of this exact site and had published a paper saying there was nothing there. So when we did this the archeologists who were working with us, told me you’re wasting your time, there isn’t going to be anything there, we know there is nothing there because we’ve already surveyed this, and even if there were something there the building would never be oriented in the way that George has put the stakes down, so why don’t we just go someplace else. We’ll show you a place where we’re sure there is something and you can dig it up. I said, "No, no, no. We’ll dig right where he’s put the stakes down." And there it was. He was twenty-seven inches off out of fifteen hundred square kilometers. That’s pretty good. Mishlove: That’s extraordinary. Schwartz: You never know, though, if it is going to succeed, so it get kind of scary. There’s a lot of money and a lot of people and there’s all kinds of witnesses who are watching this. There were researchers from several universities who were watching this whole process and were shaking their heads and going, "This is a complete waste of time." And yet George was able to put stakes and he even showed us where the doorway was. Mishlove: And all of this, of course, was documented on film. This took place again in the 1970's? Schwartz: This was 1979 to 1981. What’s particularly interesting about all this, was that when I announced the eastern harbor work at the Underwater Archeology Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1980 and sent it in to a number of archeological publications they all said it was impossible. "Can’t happen, don’t believe it, couldn’t possibly be true….," were typical responses. Now, twenty years later, the French are announcing the same discoveries that we made in 1979, and it’s on the cover of magazines. I have to wonder if I had just announced the discoveries without revealing how we had found them, what would have happened. I think that tells us a great deal about where we are as a society and the kind of values we have, and the sorts of things we are willing to believe in, or not believe in. Mishlove: I think it’s fair to say now that some twenty years later in spite of the very impressive work you did and the very substantial documentation of that work, the field of psychic archeology never really took off in any substantial way. Schwartz: Well yes. What’s happened is that we have done a number of experiments. I would say it certainly took off for Mobius. We did experiments all over the world with a variety of researchers. But as a field, I think it was too controversial for archeologists and it was too outside of the normal laboratory statistical work for a lot of parapsychologists. It hasn’t blossomed in the way that I had hoped because it was sort of between schools. 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. [break] Mishlove: Welcome back to Virtual U. I’m your host, Jeffrey Mishlove, and my guest Stephan Schwartz is author of The Alexandria Project and The Secret Vaults of Time. For the past hour and a half or so we’ve been documenting some of the extraordinary successes and the amplification of a clairvoyant technique known as remote viewing to the field of archeology. Now let’s talk a little bit for the benefit of our listeners, Stephan, about how one might begin to explore this talent in a personal level. Schwartz: I think the first thing to bear in mind is that what you are doing is not extraordinary. That this is normal functioning. That what you’re doing is claiming your own birthright. This isn’t something that’s coming to you from outside. This is something you were born with. You need to be relaxed, it should be playful and fun. If you want to begin to work with remote viewing, I would suggest you try this: before you go to a party, before you go to a house or a business meeting where you’ve never been before, stop in the parking garage, or pull over on the side of the street. Take a couple of deep breaths and close your eyes. Say to yourself: there’s something I’m going to see at this place, some image that’s going to be so specific and so strong that I will always associate my experience there with this image, and then draw on it. Open your mind and just allow the first image that comes to you to ermerge. This should not be a complicated drawing, just a simple geometric form. Once you get that little drawing, and it should be a simple circle or a square or a triangle, begin asking yourself some questions. Is there a color that’s predominant? Is there a texture to it? Is it one piece or several pieces? I was at a conference recently where there were all these people teaching a very complicated remote viewing technique. I was asked to judge an experiment they had done. They had a whole bunch of people who did it and not a single person got the right target. Everybody was very depressed and we were talking about it at dinner and I said to the people there, "All right. I’ve selected five targets and they’re all physical objects that you can hold in your hand. Put out your right hand if you’re right handed, your left if you’re left handed. Put your hand out and imagine I’m putting the object in your hand. I’m going to show it to you in twenty minutes and I don’t know which one of the objects that I have selected is going to be the one chosen. I’m going to have somebody else do that. I’m now handing you the object. Hold it. Is it smooth? Is it rough?" I asked them a series of simple little questions like that. Then I had some one not from the table select a number between one and five. Of the nine people at the table, seven people got a first place match. That is, the description they gave was most like that target in comparison to the five targets that I had selected. It wasn’t really an experiment, just a little demonstration to show the people at the table how easily and accurately they could remote view. You need to first of all to recognize you already have this ability, you’re just awakening it. It’s a normal human function and you need to be playful with it. When you’re going to have an experience, before that experience happens, try to get a sense of what’s going to happen. You’ll be amazed, I think, at how accurate you are. I said this the other day to someone and he came back and told me he was going to a meeting in Washington, D.C., and he just stopped in the parking garage and visualized, "What will this room I’m going to go into be like?", and he said he got this overpowering image of three strong red stripes. He walked up into the board room of this company and there on the back behind the man who was the Chairman of the Board was a big painting, and it was three strong red stripes. So this is something that you can do. Don’t expect photo realism, however. It’s more like a dream image. Everybody who’s listening to me has some capacity to do this. Some people are better than other people, just like some people are better runners, or better musicians, or better mathematicians. But all of us have the capacity to do this to some degree. You can do it, you don’t need a lot of classes or anything. This is something that is innate to you and, if you allow yourself to experience the signal, you will get it. Mishlove: I think most people in our culture never even try to do remote viewing because we’re sort of educated to think that it must be impossible to begin with. Schwartz: Yes, I think that’s true. We have a strong conditioning. When you go to school you get lots and lots of strokes if you come home with "A’s" in your math course. You do not get a lot of strokes if you say, "You know I think that little girl at the desk next to mine is going to fall down and break her arm." People would look at you, consider you a weird kid.. We very quickly learn to suppress this aspect of ourselves. Studies have shown, for instance, that young children frequently describe bands of color around people and yet by the time they are seven, it begins to fade, and by the time they’re eight or nine they can no longer do it. My own view is that psychic functioning probably began to change when cultures started to urbanize. As soon as we moved into close proximity with one another, the things that made psychic functioning valuable, like where is the gazelle going to be, because that’s the difference between eating and starving, were gone. In this new, more densely populated, environment, the sensitivity that would answer the question about the gazelles, became a liability. Do you really want to know, as you walk down the street, what everybody thinks about your hairdo? Most people don’t. I think we began to close this part of ourselves down because it was just too painful to constantly be aware of the input that was coming in about people’s feelings and people’s attitudes, particularly about ourselves. Mishlove: And of course, along with civilization we began to hide certain parts of ourselves from ourselves. The parts that didn’t fit in with the social norm. Schwartz: Absolutely. But it didn’t so much disappear as transform itself. There are studies, for instance, among Chief Executive Officers of corporations, showing that those who do best at a precognitive psychic task are the ones who make the most money. In primitive cultures if you know where the game is, your family eats. In our culture if you know where the best investment is, your family prospers. Those are the warriors in our culture, just like the warriors with bows and arrows. Mishlove: We’ll be back with Stephan Schwartz after these messages from WisdomRadio. [break] |
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