B is for Bilocate
Emotions sometimes speed out of control before we can define them, and suddenly we’re transported inside of Steven Spielberg’s celluloid world, only to find two hours later, physically we haven’t traveled at all. Dreaming is similar. Your physical body is sleeping, but your mind is somewhere else. The ability to be in two places at the same time is no doubt the role of imagination, but increasingly a mission of technology, evident by our everyday telephone that allows us to feel joined in another space, to our now-future where holograms beam CNN reporters and Telstra executives in real-time. While it’s believed that many mystics and saints could bilocate, such as Padre Pio whose doppelganger would be seen simultaneously around the world, the stealth tactic of remote viewing is more secular although lesser known. Remote viewing, the ability to perceive and obtain information about a distant person or event armed with only geographical coordinates, was the objective of the 1972 CIA-sponsored project led by scientists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and conducted by now-famous remote viewers Ingo Swann and Uri Geller, among others, for the purpose of espionage. Although the operation ended, as it did at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR) where remote viewing experiments as well as other mind-matter scientific studies occurred for nearly three decades, investigation into the tools and techniques continue and are freely accessible to the masses. Now, despite the fact that astral projection and out-of-body experiences make skeptics like James Randi chuckle, it’s apparent that culture’s desire to behave like a quanta and be in two places at once isn’t going away. And as to whether or not technology can make us omnipresent like God himself-herself-itself-yourself, well, I guess we’ll “see.”