What Is Remote Viewing? The Experiment That Made Me Question the Limits of Consciousness

There are experiences in mediumship that are impressive in the moment.

And then there are experiences that stay with you.

They return to you when you are walking the dog, making a coffee, sitting quietly, or thinking about the nature of the work itself. Not necessarily because they gave you an answer, but because they left you with a much bigger question.

A remote viewing exercise I recently did with medium Kerstin Caldwell was one of those experiences for me.

It was so vivid — and contained such specific information that I had no conscious way of knowing — that it has made me think much more deeply about consciousness itself.

Where is consciousness?

Is it entirely generated by the physical brain?

Is awareness restricted to the boundaries of the physical body?

And if it isn't, what are we actually accessing when we work psychically, mediumistically or intuitively?

I don't pretend that one experience can scientifically answer those questions. But I do know that, for me personally, this experience made it increasingly difficult to think of consciousness as something neatly contained within the physical body.

And perhaps even more importantly, it reminded me of something I think we sometimes forget in spiritual and mediumistic development:

We need to experiment.

Listen to the Soul Sync conversation with Kerstin Caldwell

What If Your Sensitivity Was Always Trying to Guide You? Growing Up in a Funeral Home, Mediumship & Becoming Fully Yourself with Kerstin Caldwell

In this episode of Soul Sync, Kerstin and I talk about the extraordinary remote viewing exercise that first connected us, her remarkable experience of growing up in a funeral home, childhood sensitivity, mediumship, the nervous system, grief, healing, improvisation, play and learning to become fully ourselves.

What actually happened in the remote viewing experiment?

The exercise itself was remarkably simple.

Kerstin was asked to bring into her awareness a place that meant something to her. I wasn't told where it was, what it looked like or why she had chosen it.

My job wasn't to guess.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

I was simply asked to become aware, notice what arose and describe it.

I began perceiving a substantial brick building. There was an unusual atmosphere to it. I became aware of different spaces, impressions, emotions and activity within the building.

And then something seemingly random entered my consciousness:

The film My Girl.

If you remember the film, its central family lives above a funeral home.

Eventually I asked Kerstin the obvious question:

Had she grown up in a funeral home?

She had.

Her father was a mortician and funeral director.

What followed went considerably further than identifying the type of building. During the exercise I became aware of elements of the layout, where particular activity happened within the property, emotional memories associated with it and Kerstin's relationship with the environment as a child.

In our Soul Sync conversation, Kerstin explains that it was not simply the physical description that affected her. It was the emotional experience of that house that I appeared to be touching.

And that is the part that fascinated me most.

So, what actually is remote viewing?

At its simplest, remote viewing describes an attempt to perceive information about a location, person, object or target that is not available through the ordinary senses.

A viewer may be physically separated from the target and, under controlled conditions, may know very little — sometimes nothing — about what the target is.

The idea is not simply to visualise somewhere.

It is to record impressions before receiving feedback.

Those impressions might include shape, texture, temperature, movement, colour, sound, emotional tone or more complex imagery.

The Monroe Institute, which still teaches remote viewing today, describes participants working not only with visual impressions but with perceived taste, smell, sound and feeling as well.

And although remote viewing can sound like a very modern spiritual idea, its modern experimental history stretches back decades.

The surprisingly serious history of remote viewing

This is where the subject becomes particularly interesting.

During the 1970s, physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff conducted experiments at Stanford Research Institute — SRI — exploring what they described as information acquisition without the use of the known senses.

Their work was controversial, but it was not confined to obscure spiritual publications. In 1974, Nature published a paper by Targ and Puthoff reporting experiments they believed suggested information could sometimes be obtained under sensory shielding.

And then government became interested.

Declassified CIA records show that US intelligence and defence agencies investigated remote viewing for years under programmes that became associated with names including GRILL FLAME and STARGATE. Some sessions were not hypothetical laboratory games: records show viewers were tasked against intelligence questions, including work connected with the US hostage crisis in Iran.

One government summary states that between 1986 and early 1995, the programme received more than 200 operational tasks from military organisations seeking information unavailable through conventional sources.

That fact alone doesn't prove remote viewing works.

But it does correct the idea that the subject has only ever existed on the fringes of spirituality.

Governments took it seriously enough to investigate.

Did the CIA prove remote viewing was real?

This is where I think we need to remain curious without rewriting history.

The research was contested.

Early positive findings attracted criticism around experimental design, judging and possible sensory cues. Researchers David Marks and Richard Kammann attempted duplicate experiments and reported in Nature that their results did not verify the earlier conclusions. Further criticism of possible sensory cueing followed.

By the 1990s, the US government commissioned an independent evaluation of the programme.

The CIA's own retrospective account is fascinatingly nuanced. It says the review found enough apparently accurate remote-viewing results that they could not simply be dismissed as randomness, while also concluding that the information was too inconsistent, unreliable and sporadic to be useful as an intelligence tool. The programme was not restarted.

That distinction matters.

There is a huge difference between saying:

“Something interesting may be happening here.”

and:

“We completely understand what is happening and can reliably use it on demand.”

We don't.

Remote viewing remains scientifically controversial, and there is no mainstream scientific consensus establishing it as a reliable mechanism of perception beyond the senses.

Personally, I'm comfortable with that uncertainty.

In fact, I think the uncertainty is where exploration becomes interesting.

The Monroe Institute and the exploration of consciousness

Anyone who starts looking seriously into expanded consciousness will eventually encounter The Monroe Institute.

Founded by Robert A. Monroe in 1971, the Institute grew out of earlier work investigating the effects of sound and states of awareness. Monroe himself began reporting spontaneous out-of-body experiences in the late 1950s, which dramatically changed the direction of his research.

Today the organisation continues to run programmes exploring meditation, expanded states of consciousness, out-of-body experiences and remote viewing.

Its Gateway work uses audio techniques and structured exercises designed to facilitate deeply relaxed and altered states of awareness. The Institute describes states including Focus 10 — “mind awake, body asleep” — and Focus 12, which it characterises as expanded awareness.

It also currently runs dedicated remote-viewing training.

I find the philosophy behind this particularly interesting because it places emphasis on direct experience.

Not simply believing something because someone tells you it is true.

Trying.

Observing.

Recording.

Receiving feedback.

Trying again.

That speaks enormously to where I am in my own development at the moment.

Explore the Monroe Institute's remote viewing programme

What the experience taught me about mediumship

Strangely, the biggest lesson from my experience with Kerstin wasn't actually about remote viewing.

It was about trying less.

I wasn't sitting there thinking:

I must prove consciousness can travel.

I wasn't desperate to be correct.

I wasn't trying to perform as a medium.

There was no great pressure attached to the outcome.

It was an experiment.

And because it was an experiment, I was curious.

That changed everything.

Kerstin was curious too. She wasn't sitting opposite me waiting for me to impress her. There was an openness between us that allowed the exercise to unfold.

That is becoming one of the biggest lessons in my own mediumistic development.

When we become obsessed with being right, we contract.

We analyse.

We begin searching for information rather than receiving it.

We decide something sounds ridiculous and discard it before discovering that the apparently ridiculous piece of information was precisely the thing that mattered.

Imagine if I'd dismissed My Girl.

What possible relevance could an old film suddenly appearing in my consciousness have had?

Quite a lot, as it turned out.

Perhaps the imagination isn't always “just imagination”

This has made me reconsider something else.

People developing psychically often say:

“But how do I know I'm not imagining it?”

My response increasingly is:

What if we stopped being quite so frightened of imagination?

That does not mean every image, thought or sensation entering our minds has paranormal significance. Clearly it doesn't.

But perhaps our inner symbolic language is one of the ways information reaches conscious awareness.

When My Girl entered my mind, I wasn't shown a neon sign saying:

KERSTiN GREW UP IN A FUNERAL HOME.

I was given something already contained within my own memory bank that could communicate the idea.

That is very similar to what I experience in mediumship.

The information comes through me.

My memories.

My emotions.

My vocabulary.

My references.

My consciousness.

The skill is learning to notice what feels different — what has arrived rather than what has been deliberately constructed.

That takes practice.

And it takes permission to get things wrong.

Is consciousness restricted to the physical body?

This is the question I keep coming back to.

I want to phrase this carefully because I am sharing my own developing understanding rather than presenting a settled scientific fact.

But through mediumship, psychic work and experiences such as this one, I have personally become increasingly persuaded that consciousness may not be entirely restricted to the physical body.

I am exploring that.

I want to test it.

I want experiences that challenge what I think I know.

And I'm equally interested when an experiment doesn't work.

In fact, the declassified remote-viewing records themselves contain both seemingly striking sessions and sessions where the viewer showed little or no correlation with the target.

To me, that's far more interesting than pretending every attempt is extraordinary.

Development isn't about collecting proof that we're wonderful psychics.

It's about discovering how consciousness behaves.

Experiment without needing an extraordinary result

If I could take one thing from this experience and give it to somebody developing their psychic or mediumistic awareness, it would be this:

Play.

Experiment.

Get together with someone you trust.

Work blind where possible.

Write down what you perceive before you receive feedback.

Notice shapes, sensations, emotions, textures, colours, movement and whatever else appears.

Don't stretch vague information to make it fit afterwards.

Be interested in the misses as well as the hits.

And above all, don't turn every experiment into a test of whether you are “good enough”.

The moment your worth becomes attached to the result, you've changed the experiment.

One of the things Kerstin speaks about so beautifully in our conversation is play — allowing the moment to take us somewhere rather than constantly trying to drive it.

Perhaps that's as relevant to consciousness as it is to life.

The more I develop, the more questions I have

There was a time when I thought development would give me more answers.

Increasingly, it seems to be giving me better questions.

What is consciousness?

What is intuition?

Where does psychic information come from?

How does the spirit world communicate through our existing memories and associations?

What happens when we stop forcing an outcome?

And how much of what we're capable of do we fail to discover simply because we've already decided what is and isn't possible?

I don't have neat answers to all of those.

I don't particularly want neat answers.

I want to keep exploring.

Because that remote viewing experience with Kerstin reminded me of something fundamental:

curiosity can take us places certainty never will.

And perhaps the moment we stop trying to prove what consciousness is, we finally create enough space to experience what it might be capable of.

Listen to the full conversation

Listen to my complete Soul Sync conversation with Kerstin Caldwell, where we explore the remote viewing experience in detail alongside her extraordinary childhood growing up in a funeral home, mediumship, sensitivity, grief, the nervous system, improv, play and becoming the fullest expression of yourself.

Want to explore your own psychic or mediumistic development?

I'm also preparing a new programme of psychic and mediumistic development classes and circles, both online and in person.

The emphasis will be on exactly this kind of exploration: understanding your own awareness, building confidence, experimenting, discovering your individual way of working and moving away from the constant pressure to be “right”.

To hear about the first classes when they are released, visit JasonPaulMedium.com and join the newsletter at the bottom of the website.

For questions, you can also contact me at hello@jasonpaulmedium.com.

Read the full conversation

Prefer to read rather than listen? Open the section below for the full transcript of my Soul Sync conversation with Kerstin Caldwell, including our discussion of remote viewing, growing up around a funeral home, sensitivity, mediumship, consciousness and becoming fully yourself.

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