Professional remote viewer John Vivanko and investigative journalist Rob Counts explore the intersection between the now famous “observer effect,” remote viewing and various time anomalies that have been known to occur during remote viewing sessions.

Counts begins the conversation by asking why psychics seem to be so inaccurate much of the time, and Vivanko shares his experience in working with experienced psychics when attempting to teach them the art and science of remote viewing.

He states that most psychics who think of themselves as being accurate typically have to let go of everything they think they know when it comes to learning remote viewing. And many, he says, are unable to do that and often quit before actually learning how to successfully remote view.

Extending this idea to virtually anyone new to remote viewing, Vivanko says that the biggest obstacle most new people have is letting go of how they think this is supposed to work.

In general, it is one’s expectations about remote viewing as well as oneself that must be released first in order for remote viewing to be successful.

The Double-Slit Experiment

Counts mentions a similarity in physics, particularly in Thomas Young’s now famous double-slit experiment, in which photons fail to behave according to our general expectations. It seems that this experiment challenges us to let go of our own preconceived ideas about the nature of physical reality.

Vivanko explains the double-slit experiment by using marbles as an analogy.

Imagine, he explains, shooting marbles at a single slit in a board. The marble passes through the slit and hits the wall behind it, leaving a tiny dot where the  marble impacted the wall.

Shoot multiple marbles, and all of them will pass through the slit, leaving a row of multiple tiny dots on the wall.

Now, if we add one more slit and continue shooting marbles through both slits, we would expect to see two rows of dots on the back wall; but that’s not what we see. 

The Observer Effect

In physics, when we’re working with electrons, which tend to act like tiny particles (hence, the marble analogy), and we shoot them through two slits in a barrier, the electrons don’t appear as dots on the wall behind the barrier.

Instead, they form a wave interference pattern of multiple lines of interference along the back wall. So, essentially, these forms of matter can behave as both particles and waves, depending on how they are observed. Hence, what is called the “observer effect.”

For most of us, this is a confounding idea because the mind tends to reify the material world and thereby assume that the material world can only be a particle or a wave, not both at the same time. 

Vivanko states that when one takes up meditation as a spiritual path and goes deep enough with it, eventually nondual states of oneness and wholeness can be experienced, which he likens to the double-slit experiment.

In other words, in the same way that meditation can interrupt our experience of the dualistic world and surprise us with the nondualistic nature that underlies this illusive reality, the double-slit experiment likewise offers us a glimpse into a deeper, nondualistic reality that underlies this illusive, dualistic world we tend to project onto it.

In both deep meditation and the double-slit experiment, says Vivanko, we have the opportunity to step outside of duality, so to speak.

Now, the crazy thing about the double-slit experiment is that when we place something there to measure and observe precisely how those particles are behaving, the wave interference completely disappears and the electrons or photons act like particles again.

When the observer enters the equation, the wave function apparently collapses to produce a particle effect without any wave interference.

This is the “observer effect.”

The Observer Effect and Nonlinear Time in Remote Viewing

So, the question arises, why does consciousness or the observer collapse the wave function?

There are multiple theories for why this occurs, but as Vivanko states, at the end of the day, they’re just theories.

Moving away from theories, Vivanko focuses on his decades of experience as a professional remote viewer. And according to Vivanko, the collapse of the wave function is a common thing to see in remote viewing. 

With remote viewing, for instance, just the act of “tasking” a blind remote viewer on something collapses the wave function. 

Keep in mind that tasking is typically done before the remote viewing session begins. The task is never revealed to the remote viewer until after the session is finished. The only thing that is revealed to the remote viewer is an alpha-numerical code associated with the otherwise blind task to be remote viewed.

To understand this, we have to step outside of linear time because it doesn’t matter when a particular remote viewing session is formerly tasked. Even if the session is not formerly tasked until five years into the future, this is enough to collapse the wave function and allow the remote viewer to successfully view the blind task five years before it is officially tasked. 

This means, according to Vivanko, he could conduct remote viewing sessions that aren’t tasked on anything at all and may not be tasked for years to come.

As such, these remote viewing sessions are similar to Schrodinger’s cat in that they now exist in a mysterious state of probability. But because these sessions will in fact be formerly tasked sometime in the future, that is enough to collapse the wave function.

Interestingly, something similar to this can happen when remote viewing the past. While most people may assume that remote viewing the past is a simple act of observing the past, this not the case. 

The observer effect is still active when remote viewing the past, meaning that remote viewing can actually affect he past.

One case in point is a remote viewing session of a past historical event in which one of the figures in the historical event visibly noticed the remote viewer observing him. This, along with various studies on retrocasusation, strongly suggest that not only do the past, present and future co-exist, they can influence one another in real time. 

This may sound crazy, but there is plenty of anecdotal, experimental and scientific data to back this up.

According to Vivanko, when a remote viewer taps into a blind task during a session, they begin to affect things.

This is essentially the observer effect at work in remote viewing.

Observing the Past Changes It

In case this seems like a one-off, consider the story of John Paul Jackson, a Christian minister who claims to have been physically taken into the past to personally witness and observe King David before he became king. 

According to Jackson, he was physically taken from bed through some kind of portal that landed him in Israel 3,000 years in the past. There he was instructed to tell the people that Saul would die in battle and David would replace him to be the greatest King of Israel ever.

He was later returned to bed, albeit bewildered and unsettled. When he asked God why this had happened, he said that God told him that there was much more to the Cloud of Witnesses than most believers realized and that He never did anything without it being Witnessed first.

Whether you accept his account or not, it is quite interesting that in his account, God seems to place great importance on the observer effect, the witness, in establishing His will on Earth.