THE ESSENTIAL OVERLAP MATRIX :

AN EXTENSION FOR A REMOTE VIEWING TOOL

By

Bill Stroud, Ph. D.

Copyright by Bill Stroud, 2001

For many remote viewers, structure is the canon of orthodoxy, and, to a large degree, demarcates its various “schools” of remote viewing training.1 Likewise, instructors often site the role of structure as the distinction between remote viewing per se and various forms of psychic activity in general.  Some even view a divergence from their specific structure as tantamount to heresy.  The structure has become their sacred scripture; not one jot or tittle must be changed without a warning of diminished returns and accusations of apostasy.

When I first began training in remote viewing, this structure became so sacrosanct to me that I found myself developing a ritual of extremely definitive procedures.  Since I had printed my name in the upper right hand corner of the page in my first training sessions, I found myself guarding against any tendency to write it in cursive thereafter. And the compulsive band played on with exactitude:  where I placed my paper in front of me, where I placed the envelope holding the target picture, the amount of light I had in the room, and what kind of pen I used (God forbid that I use a pencil!). I so restricted the environment that any noise permeating the room was viewed as totally forbidden. Needless to say, all of this functioned psychologically to give me the most wonderful rationalization concerning why I, most of the time, just could not do a practice session:  things were not just right.

 

Any new discipline that entails even the smallest amount of mystery, whether it be of a religious or a parapsychological genre, tends to push it toward the establishment of some concrete basis for symbolizing and protecting its authority.  Every major religion has its Scripture.  The Jewish religion (in its early orthodox form) grounded its appeal in the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings; Christianity added a collection of documents that make up the New Testament; Islam anchored its beliefs and activities in the Koran; the Mormons have their tablets of Joseph Smith; and the Church of Scientology has L. Ron Hubbard.  Given this tendency to objectify theoretical constructs into authoritative linguistic form, I anticipate many remote viewers dreaming of pilgrimages to touch the hem of Ingo Swann's garment, expressing vows of fidelity to his system!  And this is not to denigrate the seminal work of Ingo Swann.  His work has stood thetest of many revisionists' challenges.  As Lyn Buchanan has said so forthrightly, “Every time we tried to change the structure from that set forth by Ingo, our scores went down.”

The challenge to any discipline is that precarious balance between amplification and outright abdication.  Unless one claims to have achieved absolute truth, his legitimacy must remain open to future expansion.  Legitimacy rests on a process of successful and pragmatic results, not on a final edition of acclaimed truth.  Consequently, change is not necessarily an abdication from a previously won title of theoretical respectability.  Most of the time, previous theory is simply expanded to be more inclusive, with the new containing the old.  Rarely does one jump to new levels of understanding without using stepping stones of the past.  Emergence, not replacement, paves the road to progress.

My work and development of what I have finally called the Essential Overlap Matrix (EOM) actually sprang from (emerged?) from the study of Phase 5 as presented in Lyn Buchanan's Training Manual and from his elaboration of it in his training sessions.  In Phase 5, according to Buchanan, the main purpose is “to find out what caused a word or phrase to appear in your session, and what its deeper meanings and implications might be.”2   I noticed that, invariably, whether I considered the “word or phrase” to be an authentic Stray Cat or an image considered as coming straight from the Signal Line (for me, a distinction which has always been hard to determine), the common factor was the “image” aspect.  And I further found myself confused about when it was appropriate to apply this Phase 5 “tool”.  On which Stray Cat?  On which image?  The key to moving me to some resolution of this dilemma was my taking note of a line in Buchanan's Manual, one which I had not given full attention to before:  “However, you must remember that somewhere inside the STRAY CAT, is a small germ of truth-a valid bit of information.” 3   But this posed to me another dilemma:  Do I take every Stray Cat or image and wield the Phase 5 tool against it?

At this juncture past studies that had been part of my academic training and readings came into play.  The dynamics of Phase 5 triggered a recall of some of the methods that the late Milton H. Erickson used in his therapeutic work with clients.  It also triggered a recall of much that I had learned about the nature of mythopoeic thought as outlined by Cassirer and others.

When Erickson wanted to communicate with the Unconscious of a client, he would start telling stories, many stories, one after the other.4  Although these stories would, on the surface, have no connection to each other, upon analysis they each could be found to have an essential identity in some respect.  The moral, as we might say, would be similar.  It was as if the impact of each tale illustrated the same meaning or lesson, although the conscious mind would not detect this singular factor.  

I had found something similar in mythical thought.  Cassirer had outlined how myth-oriented cultures had a mode of thought distinct from that of scientific developed cognition.5  In primitive cultures images were somewhat fluid.  An aspect of an image evoked the equivalent in experience of the whole image.  What to the modern mind appears as contradiction was not seen as such in primitive thought.  Likewise, Eric Voegelin, in his study of the “cosmologically oriented societies”6 pointed out how one god of a nation could absorb the names of other gods without any sense of cognitive dissonance.  Among mythical figures, it was the essence expressed by the god, not the personage per se, that was symbolized in the mythical form.  In primitive cultures, one might actually speak of the devastation of a storm, not with reference to the Storm God, but with reference to the God of War.  In a storm and in war one experiences something in common:  devastation.

I was also aware that Freud's work on dream analysis had found similar dynamics.  The manifest content of a dream was not necessarily the underlying import of the dream image.  The “other” person in a dream could be a representation of the dreamer.  And we all know about the cigar, don't we?  (Even if we have never inhaled!)

Against this background, I began to approach Phase 5 of my remote viewing sessions with a different slant.  Why go through the frustrating process of deciding which image to put through the Attribute, Object, Subject, and Topic workout?  And even if I were to run every Stray Cat through this cat box of associative analysis, is it possible that doing so singly may be causing me to miss that single aspect which, like a signal thread, runs through the multiple array of images.  And, furthermore, whether I identify the image as a true Stray Cat or as a “Cat from the signal line” may not be so significant to the session.  I surmised that maybe there is in each a singular aspect which each image has in common.  I began to call this an overlap of essence, using an analogy of taking several transparent pictures and stacking them on top of each other to see if through all of them there is something that stands out as constant to each-or to most of them.

I suspect that it was here also that Cassirer had an influence on the form that the matrix would take for showing possible constancy:  One on Cassirer's earliest works was entitled “Substance and Function.”  I believe this title triggered the idea of having two basic forms of analysis to be measured by the matrix:  Shape/Form and Function/Action.  I surmised that an image could be significant as to form or to function--or both.  Images may overlap in form:  a ball, an apple, a wheel, bull's eye target, etc. i.e., “something round.”  Or it could overlap as regards an activity or action:  ambulance (rescuing), Swat Team (rescuing), life preserver (rescuing).

I further felt it would be necessary to extract from the overlap what would serve as a preliminary summary for each column that exhibited an essential overlay. Consequently, after the Shape/Form column I left a blank column to accommodate a couple of sentences to summarize any overlap of shape or form.  I made a similar column for a summary after the Function/Action column.

I further surmised that even if there was an overlap within one or both of these formal constructs, it was altogether possible that these essential overlays were themselves mere hints and not literal configuration of the target's form or activity. Consequently, I made the final step an exercise that I called “New Associations.”  

But you have to stop somewhere!  So I then left room for a Preliminary Summary for articulating what I intuitively felt to the impact on me of the entire exercise. (For an elaboration of other dynamics which contributed to the matrix, see the initial description given in the article, “Making a Stray Cat Prolific:  Thesaural Imaging and Remote Viewing,” http://drbillstroud.com/id49_making_a_stray_cat_prolific.htm)

The following EOM displays the specific columns and notation fields mentioned above.  Also, in the matrix is data from an actual remote viewing session:

The following was the target picture:

_______________

1Note particularly the distinctions evident in the sequence and character of the sessions done by the Hawaiian Remote Viewing Guild in contradistinction to the more traditional structure of the original Ft. Meade group who sat at the feet of Ingo Swann.

2Lyn Buchanan,  Controlled Remote Viewing:  Course Training Manual, p. 33.

3Op. cit., p. 36.  

 4For an exhaustive treatment of Erickson's therapeutic use of “tales,” see Sidney Rosen, My Voice Will With You:  The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson.  New York:  W. W. Norton & Company, 1982.

5For an extensive explication of mythical thought as a particular symbolic form, see Ernst Cassirer, Mythical Thought.  Vol II of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955.

6For a discussion of this phenomenon, see Eric Voegelin, Order and History.  Volume One:  Israel and Revelation. Louisiana State University Press, 1956, p. 7.

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Bill Stroud, of Clearwater, Florida, has an extensive background in three areas: theology, philosophy and psychology (B.D, Th.D., Ph.D). Although semi-retired, he is active as a speaker, freelance writer and a workshop presenter for educational and service agencies.  He is currently in training in the theory and methodology of remote viewing under the tutelage of Lyn Buchanan of Alamogordo, NM. http://www.crviewer.com

Address comments to:  drstroud@houston.rr.com