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.”

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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.

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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.

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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)