Author & Website Background
I have spent a substantial portion of my free time in the last year exploring many of the topics that self-described sane people in the western world tend to quickly get squirmy or contemptuous around.
These are not limited to, but include: controlled remote viewing (CRV), “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAPs), western esotericism & “magic”, mystical Christianity, meditation of many varieties as well as EEG research on it, “New Age” topics, academic parapsychology research, Carl Jung’s depth psychology, near death experience (NDE) case literature, chi gong & Taoist internal alchemy, Kundalini awakenings, scholarly reincarnation research from the University of Virginia, lucid dreaming & other altered states research, and more.
And, if you had asked me a year ago, I would have scoffed alongside the rest and told you it was all pseudoscience and nonsense– contempt prior to investigation. To this day, I am not liable to accept information without good data, and it was only on the testimony of a televised statistics professor that I gave credence to any of it in the first place (more on that following), and then one thing led to another.
Despite my explorations of these topics, I do not believe I have become any less objective, even though my worldview has expanded beyond pure materialism– and if you follow this website, you may begin to see evidence for this as well. I would still assert I am indeed one of the more reasonable people whose writing you may encounter on these topics in the informal sphere, and my interest in these subjects has not seen me leave my logic at the door.
I believe more strongly than ever that the only way to navigate an immersion into the strangeness that manifests itself in these fields is via a metaphorical “hand on the wall of the maze”, and that is done by keeping your good sense about you. However, remember that logic is only as good as the presuppositions it builds upon, and I encourage you to remain vigilant regarding the axioms your logic stems from.
That said, It’s only on the testimony of reliable people (like reputable military personnel, academics with relevant degrees and research tracts from accredited institutions, and people who can or have objectively demonstrated the veracity of their claims in some suitable fashion), traceable documents, extensive cross-referencing, and personal replication that I will come to say that a counter-cultural statement, belief, or practice is legitimate, with merit, or that it warrants honest investigation.
I would provide some additional background on myself since that is in order when discussing topics such as these. I am not an academic by vocation despite the fact that I spent a good deal of my time nosing through scholarly works and academic journals online. My profession is business, by trade and degree, but my primary avocation is very much the mind, and the “hard problem” of consciousness.
Yet, it is to be acknowledged that there are far more credentialed and experienced individuals who fail to make headway in the culture on topics such as these, and I certainly ask that you wouldn’t take the word of an amateur writer online if you would not accept the testimony and research of a professional.
That said, my primary purpose in authoring the content that will appear on this website is not persuasion, but simply to provide a resource for those who find themselves on a similar track, and as a space to sort out my own thoughts, speak rightly on them, and hopefully enrich other individuals in the process. To echo Charles Leadbeater (and it is to be noted that I am not an advocate for him nor the Theosophical society, but I find myself in agreement on this point):
“I am not writing for those who do not believe that there is such a thing as clairvoyance, nor am I seeking to convince those who are in doubt about the matter. In so small a work as this I have no space for that [.]” (Leadbeater, 1903, p. 6).
Statistically Significant?
As for my induction into the “loony bin”– I was an unwitting victim of the YouTube algorithm.
After seeing this video, I was intrigued, but skeptical. I did more reading online and in print. I purchased a number of books on the topic, including works from the “remote viewers” that had been a part of the military intelligence unit like Joe McMoneagle, Lyn Buchanan, Paul H. Smith, as well as the researchers from Stanford Research International (SRI) who had done the original academic work on the topic in the 70s. Books like “Mind Reach” and “Margins of Reality” which outlined the research from SRI & Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR), really captured my attention.
I consumed many dozens, if not hundreds of videos from Parapsychologist Jeffery Mishlove’s Youtube Channel, “New Thinking Allowed”, which features interviews with hundreds of heavy hitting researchers and authors in the field of parapsychology and high strangeness.
And, for those willing to take the plunge, I can recommend no better introductory reading on a wide variety of “paranormal” topics than Jeffery Mishlove’s winning essay submission to the Bigelowe Institute of Consciousness Studies (BICS) on the topic of the best evidence for the continuation of consciousness after death, for which he won $500,000 dollars. Link provided below for the backstory on the competition and the paper itself.
After much reading and listening, I finally chose a remote viewing teacher (mine has been Lyn Buchanan via his asynchronous course offering) and I learned the basics of CRV, and did enough of it at an entry level to satisfy my own skepticism and curiosity. I came to my own positive conclusion on the subject after seeing the empirical “feedback” on some of my “targets”, and letting others in my life judge and give their feedback to help render a verdict on whether I was insane or not. The jury voted in favor of sanity.
I still recommend controlled remote viewing to people due to the fact that it is empirical by design in it’s training, and I would estimate that for most people, they can see their first resounding success in a few weeks of fairly hardcore CRV practice. I say a few weeks simply because the controlled remote viewing framework is rigid and procedurally complex, so most of that introductory training is just learning vocabulary, drilling “ideograms”, etc. I now understand that CRV is not a magic sauce, and other forms of RV do work because it is a sub-phenomena of consciousness that allows the perception, and not the CRV framework– but a repeatable framework does increase consistency, just as in programming frameworks, for those familiar.
I will discuss this more in other articles for those interested, as well as write one on how to learn the fundamentals of CRV to validate it for yourself, as there are not many good resources online for just learning the basics for free. Once you validate it, and given that you still have a continued interest, only at that point would I recommend paying someone to teach you (which you absolutely should do, after a certain point). Again, I’ll create a whole section on the website for CRV in the future.
After I confirmed the reality of non-local perception, I immediately suspected that everything I knew about reality might be wrong. Given that I was now treating the reality of remote perception as the presupposition on which my logic would follow, I felt there were no longer mainstream sources to help me go further and make sense of things. In some capacity, I realized I couldn’t take anything “accepted as true” for granted anymore.
I felt that if our knowledge about the very phenomenon that composes our mind and being (consciousness) was this woefully incomplete, then I was going to have to go a little “off reservation” to gather enough data to personally construct for myself a new, fully coherent model of reality that could encompass this new information.
And, that’s what I’ve done for about a year. To codify and refine my ideas, Spacetime Sushi was born.
I hope you enjoy the information on this website, and if you want to get in touch with me, please reach out via email on the contact page.
I’ll see you in there!
– Matthew
References
Leadbeater, C. (1903). Clairvoyance (2ndnd ed., p. 6). : Theosophical Publishing Society. Retrieved March 12, 2023, from https://archive.org/details/clairvoyance00lead/page/6/mode/2up