Ingo Swan on Skeptics:

“True skep­ti­cism does not begin by being anti-anything. The processes of open con­sid­er­a­tion and exam­i­na­tion (i.e., research) will ulti­mately estab­lish whether some­thing exists or not.”

Below are excerpts from Ingo Swann’s arti­cle, Remote View­ing vs Its Skep­tics. The writ­ing is for the most part schol­arly, demon­strat­ing the nature of the author and his defense of capa­bil­i­ties of the human mind that sci­ence refuses to acknowl­edge, despite all the evidence.

The Larger Pic­ture of Remote Viewing

ver­sus

The Larger Pic­ture of Skep­tics and Debunkers

A more expan­sive treat­ment of this topic will be ren­dered in a forth­com­ing mini-essay enti­tled “Remote View­ing and Skep­tics of the Twen­ti­eth Century.”

It should be stated that this topic is fairly com­plex. It involves much more than the very tiny minor­ity who opine that our sen­tient species does not pos­sess super­pow­ers of bio-mind — such as intu­ition, telepa­thy, remote view­ing and var­i­ous forms of cre­ativ­ity and “higher-mind” functioning.

Ear­lier psy­chi­cal researchers and para­psy­chol­o­gists have some­times inad­e­quately addressed this topic in brief papers. But no lengthy exam­i­na­tion has ever appeared.

Dur­ing the mid-1970s, how­ever, one of the agen­cies of the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity requested a lengthy exam­i­na­tion. I was involved with a num­ber of pro­fes­sional con­sul­tants in its prepa­ra­tion and the report was duly pro­duced under the work­ing title “Social Resis­tance to Psi.”

—————————————————

Three of the major obser­va­tions of the report estab­lished the following:

(1) Since doubt is con­sid­ered a legit­i­mate func­tion within intel­lec­tual processes, the role of those who doubt is given more legit­i­macy than those who do not doubt. Were this not so then the mean­ing of doubt would become vague.

(2) When doubt is super­im­posed on direct human expe­ri­enc­ing, then the doubt assumes a pri­or­ity because of its per­ceived legit­i­macy. The super­im­po­si­tion then results in a sub­tle shift of focus away from exam­in­ing the direct human expe­ri­enc­ing and rein­stalls the focus within the con­texts of the var­i­ous intel­lec­tu­alisms that have become involved.

(3) The his­tory of intel­lec­tu­alisms demon­strates (a) that they have rel­a­tively short terms of social fash­ion­abil­ity, and (b) that they tend to be elit­ist in nature because the larger pop­u­la­tions either do not, or can­not, share in them.

Com­bin­ing these three obser­va­tions results in a fourth: that doubt is rel­a­tive to social enclaves and is thus only tran­si­tory against larger issues that remain per­ma­nent within the direct expe­ri­en­tial thresh­olds of our species.

Reduc­ing these four obser­va­tions to a pos­si­bly crude level, skep­tics and debunkers come and go — but the expe­ri­enc­ing thresh­olds of the species remain the same. The expe­ri­enc­ing thresh­olds are there­fore per­pet­ual. Skep­ti­cism that advo­cates doubt regard­ing some­thing per­pet­ual is rel­e­vant only to the tran­si­tory intel­lec­tual bound­aries within which it has arisen.

—————————————————-

The sci­ences and acad­eme of the mod­ern West have never moved full-force behind research­ing the super­pow­ers. It has even been stated in the past, espe­cially by many noted sci­en­tists, that the super­pow­ers are not wor­thy of sci­en­tific interest.

So when mod­ern skep­tics protest, it is not really pos­si­ble to iso­late and iden­tify what they are protest­ing about. That our species does pos­sess super­pow­ers of bio-mind can’t really be doubted. Even if only tem­porar­ily so, such super­pow­ers often appear in naive chil­dren for good­ness’ sake, and often spon­ta­neously appear and dis­ap­pear in so-called “nor­mal” adults.

The actual issue, then, is the real extent of human sen­tiency, the actu­ally exist­ing rudi­ment fac­ul­ties of the super­pow­ers within our genetic species.

If this is accepted as the vir­tual real­ity issue, then skep­ti­cism and debunk­ing regard­ing it become sub-issues attached not to the vir­tual real­ity itself, but to vari­eties of antag­o­nis­tic hearsay that infect many intel­lec­tu­alisms. It is this antag­o­nis­tic hearsay which accounts for social resis­tance to our species’ super­pow­ers of bio-mind.

—————————————————–

The verb “debunk” means “to expose the sham of false­ness of some­thing.” Debunk­ing is there­fore a valu­able func­tion and always has been — in that cer­tain spec­i­mens of our species like to engi­neer sham and false­ness in order to ben­e­fit from them.

Implicit in the term, how­ever, is the dis­tinc­tion between (1) expos­ing –after the fact of exam­i­na­tion, and (2) accus­ing –before the fact. In this dou­ble sense, the term can take on Machi­avel­lian efficiency.

“Machi­avel­lian­ism” refers to Machiavelli’s polit­i­cal the­ory that pol­i­tics is amoral and that any means how­ever unscrupu­lous can jus­ti­fi­ably be used in achiev­ing polit­i­cal power or purposes.

The intro­duc­tion of Machi­avel­lian­ism into skep­ti­cism and debunk­ing runs counter to their orig­i­nal eth­i­cal func­tion and sets up lachry­mose con­texts so labyrinthine that very few can nego­ti­ate them. Indeed, Machi­avel­lian­ism can only be effec­tive pro­vided the labyrinthine con­texts can­not be unravelled.

As but one exam­ple of Machi­avel­lian debunk­ing, though, I refer the truly inter­ested to the paper enti­tled “Sci­ence Ver­sus Show­man­ship: A His­tory of the Randi Hoax” by Michael A. Thal­bourne just pub­lished in The Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Soci­ety for Psy­chi­cal Research (Oct. 1995, Vol.89, No. 4).

(Remote View­ing vs Its Skep­tics by Ingo Swann)