WHY BOTHER WITH ESP? Discovering That You Are The Love That You Seek
Author: Russell Targ

CHAPTER 7

Why bother with ESP?
Discovering That You Are the Love you Seek

Excerpt from: LIMITLESS MIND
By Russell Targ

If you haven’t discovered who you truly are, your assumed
competence is just a wall of sand against the oncoming tide.
—Tarthang Tulku

Remote viewing is not necessarily a spiritual path, but it can lead us there, giving us the mind-quieting tools and experience to follow some of the well-trodden paths that have been described for millennia. More important, our experience with remote viewing shows without a doubt that we can learn to expand our unconditioned awareness through all of space and time — to directly explore the timeless existence described by the mystics. Allowing your awareness to expand into this feeling of spaciousness is one of the great rewards of this practice; you open the gates, and out flows who you are.

It is increasingly recognized that our physical and mental health require that we take personal initiative to control our chattering minds. The quiet mind has the opportunity to experience what Jesus called “the peace that passeth understanding.” As I described earlier, between the inflow of remote viewing and the outflow of spiritual healing, we can experience the overwhelming peace and oceanic connection that is available to each of us in the present moment.

In the present, there is neither perception nor intention — just pure awareness. Our ability to share this experience of freedom, love, and spaciousness is what gives meaning to our lives. With our present technology of television, video games, e-mail, and computers, however, we run the risk of never having another quiet moment. This represents the greatest loss we could possibly experience.
Carl Sagan was a great astronomer and a celebrated teacher, but he found the idea of God to be incomprehensible.1 Why couldn’t this brilliant man find God? From my observations and reading, I think it was because he could never be quiet. Beyond that, as an astronomer he thought God was to be found on the outside, rather than on the inside. Powerful telescopes will not help us in our search for love, peace, or God.

In fact, much suffering is caused by looking on the outside for what is actually on the inside. I believe that the spiritual practice that works for the twenty-first century is, first of all, to resolutely desire freedom from the conditioned awareness of our story and our past, and then to find a way to be still. The path I am describing asserts that the existence of God is a testable hypothesis. The American mystic Joel Goldsmith tells us that God is not an entity, but rather, “God may be experienced as an activity in consciousness,” like a flow of loving awareness.

Many wisdom teachers seem to agree that in order to discover who we really are, we must find a path that allows us to surrender fear, coveting, and craving, then quiet the mind in spite of all the advertising designed to create needs that make us suffer.

Teachings along the Quiet Path
On this important subject of stuff and necessities in our lives, my teacher Gangaji writes:

I invite you to not get anything. You see what a relief it is already? Already there is an opening. I invite you to not remember anything, to not keep anything, to not use anything, to not accumulate anything, to not have anything when you walk out the door. How about not having anything right now? And if you can truly hear that, then you have heard what I have to teach, because in the moment of not having anything, which is the moment of death, there is a revelation of who you are.

But who you are needs nothing, and you have the capacity as nothing to realize yourself fully. Not “nothing” as you would think “nothing” to be — something as useless. And not “nothing” as you would hope “nothing” to be — something that would be very useful. You could say, “Well, I have nothing, so now I am free.” Not that either.

Then there is conversation that naturally takes place, whether words are involved or not. There is a transmission from mind to mind, from heart to heart, that naturally, effortlessly occurs. That is what we are here for.

2Father Thomas Keating, a revered Catholic priest and mystic who teaches centering prayer, says, “God’s first language is silence. Everything else is a bad translation.”

3“Thou art that” is the recurrent theme through the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita. This is Vedic shorthand for the profound teaching that we already have the whole universe within us, within our awareness. That, of course, includes the love we are looking for outside ourselves.

4 The contemporary musician and teacher Kenny Werner writes in his inspiring book, Effortless Mastery, “It is said that one drop of ecstasy from the Self, the God inside us, renders all other pursuits insignificant. At that point, the seeker has found everything he has sought.”

5My personal goal has been, for many years, to turn a rocket scientist into a human being. I have believed that a human being could experience more meaning in life and more peace of mind than a rocket scientist.

I have been a professional scientist for more than forty years, in the fields of both laser physics and parapsychology research. Although I was trained as a physicist, over the past twenty-five years I have somehow coauthored five books — all of which have “mind” in their titles. While physics attempts to reveal the mysteries of the material universe, it has curiously little to say about mind or consciousness. Over the years, I have become passionate about understanding the nature of consciousness and how it allows our awareness to transcend space and time — for, indeed, it does.

For more than a decade, I toiled with thousands of my fellow engineers in the aerospace slave pits of a large defense contractor in Palo Alto, California. I was well paid, and I had created an exciting research program to put lasers on commercial airplanes, enabling them to detect and avoid dangerous wind hazards. We had even designed a system to do this kind of laser-based remote sensing from outer space, allowing me to think of myself as a “rocket scientist.” The bad news is that my inner space was filled with fear, resentment, anger, and desperation.

I’ve managed to move myself from a wage-slave mentality of fear and desperation to a life that is focused increasingly on gratitude and love. My purpose in writing this book is to be helpful — to help others find peace as I have now found. It may be hard to imagine, but the significant love available to us transcends girlfriends, boyfriends, romance, or sex. The love that I’m talking about is the love that exists at our core. If you are vigilant, no one can ever separate you from that love.
I learned about this love through the grace of the spiritual teacher Gangaji, a brilliant, beautiful, compassionate American woman and mystic. She teaches self-inquiry in the tradition of advaita and the Indian saint Ramana Maharshi.

6 It is through her loving transmission that I made the transition, eight years ago, from hard-edged scientist to mashed potato — a more serene, happy human being. After a weeklong retreat with Gangaji in the mountains of Colorado, I returned to my desk at Lockheed Missiles & Space, and told them, with the greatest of ease, that I was leaving. It’s not that there was anything wrong with my job, but it had become an absurd way for me to spend my life. I launched myself on a different path to spaciousness that didn’t require a missile.

The mind, when it is quiet and open, has the opportunity to be overwhelmed by love. Buddhists call this “undifferentiated awareness.” Just as love is the core teaching in Christianity, experiencing our unbounded and undifferentiated awareness (sunyata)

7 is one of the principle teachings in Buddhism. This is the teaching of empty, empty, happy, happy — whereas, in Silicon Valley, where I live, “full, full, happy, happy” is the usual goal. Initially, the latter seems like a good idea, but over the millennia it has invariably been found to fail, for the hungry ghost within the ego never has enough. The hungry ghost is the one with the big belly, tiny mouth, and skinny neck; it can never eat enough to be full.

I am not encouraging you to believe in any particular doctrine, since I know from my own experience that many people, especially scientists, would rather suffer fear, anxiety, and depression than believe anything that might be thought silly or doctrinaire. Silliness, for a scientist, is a fate worse than death. I am, however, telling you that life is much, much more enjoyable from where I stand now.

Excerpt from: LIMITLESS MIND By Russell Targ, .95, Trade Paperback, New World Library, Toll-free Order: 1-800-972-6657 Ext. 52 or Online: www.newworldlibrary.com
Available at local bookstores and on Amazon.com






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Russell Targ is a physicist and author who has devoted much of his professional career to the research of the human capacity for psychic ability. In 1972, he co-founded the Stanford Research Institute’s federally-funded program that investigated psychic abilities in humans. The program provided invaluable information and techniques to various government intelligence agencies, including the DIA, the CIA, NASA, and Army Intelligence. In his ten years with the program, Targ co-published his findings in some of the most prestigious scientific journals. He is the co-author, with Jane Katra, of five books about psychic abilities, two of which are: Miracles of Mind: Exploring Non-local Consciousness & Spiritual Healing, and The Heart of the Mind: How to Experience God Without Belief (both New World Library.)..Targ was also quite active in the development of the laser and its various applications, having written over fifty articles on advanced laser research. He is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers and has received two NASA awards for inventions and contributions in laser and laser communications. Recently retiring from his position as senior staff scientist at Lockheed Martin, Targ now devotes his time to ESP research and offering workshops on remote viewing and spiritual healing. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

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