I take Russell Targ’s position on psi, Rob: We ALL have the faculty, distributed along the standard bell curve of any human ability: a few are concert-pianist level, a few are ‘Chopsticks’ level, and the great majority of us sit somewhere between these extremities, on the high hump of the distribution curve.
People like Russ, Dean Radin and others have done such watertight, exceptionally high-quality experimental work on demonstrating the reality of psi, that only those who are more than averagely shaken up by close encounters with it (as absolutely all of us are to some degree), plus the rabid, dogmatic philosophical materialists forming the current gocos* of the hard sciences, are still able to scoff loftily about it “all being utter nonsense!!!”; from a position of deep, wilfully-blind ignorance of the data, of course.
Revisiting Russ’s output recently, as I’ve been doing for the purpose of my continuing musings in the psi sphere, I find that it was 23 years in total that he and Hal Puthoff were generously funded - sic! - by the CIA and the US Department of War (laughingly called ‘Defence’) to run experimental AND TRAINING work in the art of ‘remote viewing’, aka clairvoyance/pre-/retro-cognition, as a possible spying technique. They were worryingly successful! The exploits that they report from that time are simply gob-smacking.
Yet we have this huge problem: we live in, grow up in, and get our early-life indoctrination from a culture where the realities of psi get routinely rubbished, denied and - most importantly - tabooed; so that we all end up tyros and utter ignoramuses about the whole crucial issue; unlike the cultures of wiser societies of other times and places, where children are encouraged from infancy to cherish and cultivate their psi-abilities.
An excellent illustration of this fact comes from one of Russ’s anecdotes about his research: They had been working with Pat Price, who had a substantial reputation for being a gifted natural psychic; a man who as a police commissioner had extensive experience of using his psi-faculty to solve crime mysteries.
Pat failed to show up one time for a scheduled experimental session, so rather than waste the session, Hella Hammid, who had been working as one of the technicians helping to run the work, and who - as far as she knew - had no special talent at psi, and didn’t think of herself as psychic at all, volunteered to take Pat’s place and see what would happen.
Surprise! She turned out to be one of the best psychic talents that Russ found in the course of his long research. Yet she’d never found out that she could do it!
That’s what a dismissive, psi-repressive culture can do!
*gocos - Guardians of current orthodoxy.