Part of the problen with this whole issue has to do with the boundaries and intersections between the brain, the mind, and the something-else-which-knows-using-them. Usually called "you", but subject to a lot of semantic confusion, since identifying "I" with a symbol is a very sluppery slope anyway.

Leaving brains aside for the moment, minds are full of things worthy of inspection. One thing they are full of is pictures, many of which come from the past, or seem to, even though they are regenerated on demand in the present. If you don't know what I am talking about just recall something you enjoyed recently -- a good laugh or a good meal or a good kiss or a win of some sort.

The other thing the mind is full of is images of possibility which are constantly being sized up to estimate the future. These are created views of what one things could happen or should happen or intends to see happen. They are dreamed up by the owner's ability as part of the effort to deal with problems in the physical universe, or social interactions, or other areas.

Rational processes such as we use every day involve shuffling these past and possible future images, and we usually reject future possibilities that seem unlikely based on our rational expectations. So even if you have a daydream about suddenly being tapped to become a movie star, you don't build your plan of action around it, usually.

In a seminar in Santa Barbara many years ago, on the exercise and development of innate abilities often thought of as psychic, Ingo Swann made the point that one of the biggest barriers to knowing on an extra-sensory basis is what he called "rational overlay". What he meant by that is instead of extending attention directly toward something remote in space or time, and knowing it, we tend by habit to then overlay our usual rational processes over it and filter what is there to be known by "thinking" about it. This cuts down the immediate perception and clouds it up with variosu judgements about what "should" be there, and as a result we don't see clearly anything that doesn't fit those filters and expectations.

Another factor which can easily confuse the whole picture is that of those past images, which we use so often to compare present situations against and leep our histories straight, many of them are painful and distressing, and for most of us, those sorts of memories can often add distress, smoke, assorted wild impulses and such to the equation. These elements of mental "noise" often distort what we see as having happened in the past, dim what we can think about clearly int he present, and influence what we envision as possible int he future. So the obfuscation gets compounded to the degree one is sitting temporarily or chronically in stirred up personal "baggage" to use a technical term. :>)

This may all be old hat to some of you who have studied the somewhat confused field, which is riddled with weird assertions and arbitraries and highly subjective views of every kind, which kind of understandably gives it a bad name in some circles. But when these factors are all accounted for the literature still presents a great deal of interesting evidence which suggests that those who report experiences such as remote viewing or remote knowing, or seeing from locations out of the body, may well be on to something, even if it is only understood through various glasses darkly.

It is of course also true that havingf such abilities roundly rejected, scorned, ridiculed or invalidated by peers can suffocate them. They are not molecules, after all, they are abilities which are itimately linked to the states of affinity, self-esteem, confidence and expectation of the owner. It would be silly to try to assess them outside that context, wouldn't it? Kind of like trying to study how fish swim in a vacuum, or something.

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