Captain of My Ship, Master of My Soul:
Living With Guidance
By F. Holmes Atwater
Digested by Lorrie Kazan


Remote Viewing is “a perceptual technique based on an innate human ability to mentally perceive and describe things separated or blocked by distance, shielding, or even time.”

The theme that runs throughout this book is one of divine guidance. You will always be taken care of, Atwater was told by his mother, and the book is filled with stories of his adventures and experiences in which this advice was proved true.

Early, during the Viet Nam era, he was intuitively guided to join the army in what he says was an attempt to avoid the draft. When asked during enlistment to choose his area of specialty, Atwater found himself drawn to the words, Army Intelligence, which were sprawled across a booklet. It’s as if someone were whispering in his ear, “This is why you are here.” He was nineteen.

The words “divine guidance” show up again and again as Atwater details the sometimes unpredictable route of his career. Ultimately (in hindsight) everything seemed to be preparing him for the mission he would eventually take on: The creation and deployment of our government’s psychic spies, whose training and consistent remote viewing coaching he would become responsible for. The project would be called Stargate.

In 1977, Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ’s Mind Reach, Scientists Look at Psychic Ability was published. This book documented the successful remote viewing experiments they were conducting at Stanford University. When Atwater and a friend read it, they were struck by the ramifications remote viewing work could have on national security. If our government was pursuing remote viewing, then surely the Russians were doing the same.


At this point, having been in the army for nine years, Atwater felt confident enough to take the book to his commanding officer and begin the circuitous route that would lead to the organization of a remote viewing unit.

Circuitous because before he could move forth with remote viewing, he was reassigned, this time to Fort Meade where he would spend the next ten years. However, synchronistically, Mind Reach resurfaced as a classified document he found locked in his new desk. Moreover, he learned that our government had been funding remote viewing studies at Standford since 1972.

He also found another secret document published by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The document, entitled, “Paraphysics R&D-Warsaw Pact,” a complete review of current knowledge of the Soviet and Warsaw Pact countries participation in psychic research and their methods of funding. The Soviets were funded via the KGB. (A copy of this document is supplied to the reader on the CD included with Atwater’s book.)

Atwater connected with DIA civilian employee, Jim Salyer, who told him the only way to discover the truth about reports regarding the Soviet’s success with parapsychology research was to replicate the experiments. Atwater then sought funding for these proposed experiments by demonstrating the probability of remote viewing’s threat to US security.

Stanford’s remote viewers were showing phenomenal results in their abilities to identify military facilities within the Soviet Union. Thus it was presumed that Soviet psychics were exhibiting at least that same level of success in describing US bases.

Atwater suggested recruiting volunteers from enlisted intelligence service people and after considerable discussions, collated the following criteria for those service people to meet:

1. Open to the idea of remote viewing.
2. Artistic talent
3. Highly esteemed by others (no weirdos)
4. Possessed the ability to absorb abundance of information without feeling “compelled to form tentative or spurious conclusions.
5. Highly motivated.
6. Able to quiet their minds and focus attention.

Atwater’s life and training lead him back to his original belief that we were not only divinely guided but that we always have access to this guidance. In fact, he was surprised to find scientific experiments conducted around something he’d always taken for granted. Even as a teenager he was able to see into the technical interior of cars, a skill that afforded him considerable expertise in mechanics.

Now he realized that Remote Viewing was not only a threat to US security, but also a measurable, scientific and powerful proof that we are much more than our physical bodies. Psychic abilities reinforce the concept of oneness and connection with a greater source. That the government saw fit to back psychic spying with money and human resources was an amazing turning point in the acceptance and validation of parapsychology.

Moreover, it was not only our government; the Soviet Union was equally committed to this exploration. To ignore the possibilities presented by parapsychology was to become vulnerable to enemy invasion and to fall far behind in the arms race. In order to remain equally powerful, or supremely powerful, the big guns had to be loosed. In this case the big guns were actually the faculties of psychic perception.

Remote viewing offered an especially unique attribute. It was shown that people (not just psychics) could be trained to go beyond the limits of time and space. Criteria were assembled to pick the candidates most likely to have the greatest success. Nonetheless, a technique and training were established which could be used by anyone with the sincere desire to learn.

This technique: Block out extraneous noise, let go of mind clutter, go within, connect, pay attention to internal clues, presume that you can connect with states other than your own. Experience oneness with people, places and objects. Release the illusion that you live only in a physical world and begin to deeply accept that you are more than your physical body.

According to Atwater, in the military, you’re either training for war or fighting one; this idea was central to Atwater’s thinking and to military personnel’s in general. While Puthoff and Targ didn’t feel there was any particular way to create a mindset conducive to remote viewing, Atwater was inspired by William Braud’s research, which indicated that there were in fact circumstances which were more conducive to “increased psychic performance.”

For example, Charles Honorton and colleagues at Psychophysical Research Laboratories in Princeton, NJ, contended that psychic information “presents itself below the threshold of conscious awareness and is therefore overwhelmed by physical sensation.”

They introduced a plan to neutralize the physical senses in order to encourage the subliminal information to surface. Honorton created the Ganzfeld technique, (German for whole field). Ping-pong balls were cut in half and placed over the subject’s eyes while headphones emanating white noise were placed over the ears. The viewer’s eyes remained open behind these translucent shields. A bright red light was then cast in order to provide a “homogeneous visual field.” Further, tactile stimulation was reduced by having the viewer recline in a comfortable chair and use relaxation exercises to remove any tension.

Statistically, the Ganzfeld studies (which were conducted by different investigators at 10 laboratories) yielded a higher number of hits, a 35% hit rate in 42 studies. The statistical probability of this was a billion to one.

Remote Viewing Training and Operations
Behaviors Characteristic to Remote Viewing

Relaxing

“The remote viewer discovers information from within rather than from sensory sources.”

This can be accessed through a process of voluntarily “letting go,” such as we do when picturing ourselves in beautiful scenes in nature.

Letting Go and Turning Inward

Generate a sense of unity and wholeness rather than separation and personal space. Mental calm replaces cognitive activity and slows the mind, enabling it to turn inward similar to our experience in a twilight state.

Resonance Phase

Viewer connects with the target. Training involves finding each viewer’s personal preferences and strengths and coaching them to trust in and follow their own processes.


Beginning Processes Used

1. Remote viewer meets someone and later is asked to connect with and describe that person’s current location.
2. Viewer is asked to describe a picture concealed in an envelope.
3. Geographical coordinates are provided to the viewer who then images the landscape found at that spot. This differs from telepathy because the viewer does not read the minds of people at the coordinate location (where he would then be limited by the knowledge of each of those minds). Instead, the viewer resonates with the landscape itself (with the coordinates) in such a way that the viewer can then objectively describe what is there.


Listening

During this phase, the viewer is in a patient state of waiting for the information to present itself. The coach encourages the viewer to describe the viewer’s own experience of observing.

Becoming Aware of Information

“This phase includes the moment just before awareness, the awareness itself, and the brief period following the awareness.” (p.91)

The brief period before the awareness is apparently a time when the viewer “experiences an emptiness or disorienting moment of confusion, as though the mind was released from the confines of the physical dimension.” (ibid)

This is also described as a state of oneness in which the viewer’s experience of being a separate self with particular ideas and biases seems to evaporate. Atwater asserts that if we were to enter this kind of somatic state we would consistently perceive the availability of what he calls “remote viewing information.” With practice we can distinguish via body sensations, or even vague images as new information seeps through.

The period after the initial awareness is equally relevant to true discovery. Here is where the viewer can allow the image to more fully emerge or “blossom” and in essence, define itself without the process of interpretation or analyzation.

Reporting

Describing what they’ve viewed without interpreting or analyzing but staying with the images as if they were still present. This is where the coach may help the viewer verbalize or draw the information. The coach is skilled at asking pertinent questions and empathic and practiced enough to know how to relate to the particular viewer, noticing body language, etc, and bringing in questions as needed to elicit information or gently redirect the viewer.

Coach can recognize certain signs to indicate that the viewer is still in the first-case stage with the information. Signs include: loss of eye contact, with the remote viewer staring into the emptiness, breaks in speech pattern, and use of present tense.


Structure is the key to the remote viewer’s process. Protocols need to be carefully followed. A monitor, working closely with a viewer, keeps the viewer on track with each segment of the protocol. Above all, the viewer is not to break structure and start speculating about content; otherwise the result will be tainted with an “analytical overlay.”

Ingo Swann, gifted psychic and remote viewer, likened the process to tuning into a “signal line,” which first effects the viewer’s autonomic nervous system, just at the edges of awareness. At this point Swann had viewers record their feeling sense. He was concerned that viewers stay with the felt sense, which was perceived by the right brain, and not allow the conscious mind to automatically create a logic around what it does not yet understand. He wanted to right brain to have sufficient time for the concepts to fully present themselves.

Swann believed that remote viewing was “the process of detecting and decoding a ‘signal line’ that provides information about what he called a ‘Matrix’ of information.” The standard definition depicts the viewer as someone who sees or mind travels to the target. Swann saw the Matrix as
“a huge, nonmaterial, highly structured, mentally accessible ‘framework’ of information containing all data pertaining to everything in both the physical and nonphysical universe.” In other words, what we might call the Akashic Records.

In his estimation, “each geographic location on the Earth has a segment of the Matrix corresponding exactly to the nature of the physical location.” Therefore, the signal line is like a radio wave and the viewer tunes into the particular frequency that is needed.