Interview II: Maureen Caudill, Author of “Suddenly Psychic”

This is Maureen’s second set of interview questions. If you haven’t read the first set, you can check it out here. Please note that this interview was conducted on September 21, 2010.

Maureen Caudill was a University Scholar and received her bachelor’s degree in physics (with a mathematics minor) with highest honors (summa cum laude) from University of Connecticut, following that with a master’s degree from Cornell University. She spent more than twenty years as a computer scientist, with fifteen of those as a researcher in artificial intelligence and neural networks. She was a program manager and researcher for a major government contractor on advanced projects such as DARPA* ( High Performance Knowledge Base program) and ARDA* ( Advanced Question Answering for Intelligence program) that strove to develop computer systems that can demonstrate human expertise in complex question understanding and intricate knowledge of detailed real-world scenarios.

Since beginning the experiences described in her book “Suddenly Psychic,” she has become accredited by The Monroe Institute as a nonresidential Outreach trainer, and now offers several different weekend workshops on learning to access altered states of consciousness and incorporating skills accessed in those states in your daily life. This includes training people in the esoteric skill of spoon-bending something that she’d have sworn was a physical impossibility, but that now virtually all students succeed at learning.

1. Out of all the experiments you wrote about it, which experiment stands out from the rest (that is, in terms of having the most significant amount of evidence)?

Probably the most amazing results to me were Dr. Gary Schwartz’s Afterlife Experiments.  I really liked a lot about how those experiments were conducted.  First, he was open to the possibility that talented mediums can connect with the dead, but he insisted on seeing actual evidence to support that supposition.  Second, he designed a protocol that was both scientifically rigorous, but also one that adapted to each medium’s preferred mode of operation.  Third, he was highly conservative when scoring the mediums’ sessions in assigning “hits” and “misses” preferring “miss” unless there was unambiguous evidence for a “hit.”  Finally, he did an extensive series of experiments, in each case making the conditions of the experiment more and more rigorous and guarding against more and more possible attempts to hoax the system from any party.

And in spite of all those checks and balances, he had mediums who tested as being 85% to 90% accurate.  When compared to a group of “controls” (basically  random college students) who typically got scores in the 20–30% range, the difference in performance was astonishing.

I think this type of experiment demonstrates both that no one, even a superstar, will be right all the time.  Dr. Schwartz has pointed out, for example, that baseball player Ted Williams, arguably the greatest hitter in baseball history, was only successful at getting a hit 40% of the time!  So any expectation that you will ever get 100% accuracy or 100% success rate when you have human beings performing a difficult task will always be unmet.  That is an impossibly high standard to demand in any test involving humans performing a task.

Bottom line, Dr. Schwartz presented incredibly compelling, rigorous evidence of the survival of personality after death.  Anyone viewing this evidence with an open mind has to be impressed with the quality of his data and the care with which he crafted his experiments.

2. In the book, you described an experience you had while participating in a Ganzfeld experiment. You pointed out some “basic problems” with the design of the experiment (i.e. the researchers weren’t too concerned with the conditions, which ultimately made it difficult for psychic phenomena to take place). Do you think these “basic problems” are prevalent in different experiments of this type?

I think that experimenters often try to force human beings into a box.  There are very few who acknowledge and accept in the design of the experimental protocols that people aren’t all the same, and that people sometimes need different circumstances to achieve similar results.  The problem, from a scientific perspective, is that experiments need to have rigid protocols so that they can (presumably) be replicated.  So, for example, I was required to have the ping-pong balls over my eyes when I did the Ganzfeld experiment described in the book.  Only problem is, my normal technique when doing a remote viewing session is to have my eyes open so I can make notes and sketch what I’m perceiving.  I had to persuade the experimenter to let me have a clipboard (I’d brought one with me!) propped on the arm of the recliner, and I had to do my notes and my sketching blind.  It really was a violation of their methodology, and it felt awkward and uncomfortable for me not to be able to see what I was writing or sketching.

The experiment protocol had a friend of mine (also very psychic) in another room watching a video clip.  He was supposed to start “sending” the images from the video to me when (over his headphones) the experimenter told him to do so.  I was supposed to be in that Ganzfeld state, with the ping-pong balls, etc. etc., and “receiving” his transmission.  After the session, I (and he) were shown 4 clips, and I was asked to choose which one was the clip he’d originally watched.

The theory in the experimenter’s mind was based on telepathy and that there had to be a “sender” and a “receiver”—the model was that telepathy was sort of like spooky radio without the technology.  The fallacies in this basic protocol are numerous and reflect a total misunderstanding of psychic skills.  For example, before the experiment, I was very careful to point out that I could discover the video clip contents any number of ways other than by my receiving what my friend transmitted telepathically.

I suggested a number of alternative ways I could discover the correct answer to the experimenter before the experiment and asked if she cared how I got the information.  She was adamant that this was not an experiment to prove telepathy, and that it didn’t matter at all what method I used.  My impression very strongly was that she didn’t believe any of the alternative methods I suggested could possibly work.  Among others, I pointed out that I might:

• Remote view and watch the clip myself as my friend was watching it—as if I were looking over his shoulder.
• Telekinetically fiddle with the computer’s random selection process to select the clip myself (It was not selected until just before the experiment began; it’s my understanding that the computer selected a random clip to show just before the experiment started.  At the same time, I believe it selected 3 other video clips as “possible targets” so I had 4 clips to choose from after the Ganzfeld part of the session was over).
• Remote view the clip prior to the experiment so I would know what was on the clip before it began. (Since the clip itself wasn’t chosen until just prior to it being shown, that was totally dismissed as a realistic possibility by the experimenter.)
• Read the experimenter’s mind and get the information from her since she also knew what the correct clip was.

The huge elephant in the room in terms of this particular protocol was that time was totally ignored.  This protocol, like most in science, insists that time is a straight, linear, and rigid.  It’s impossible to look into the future.  It’s impossible for the future to affect the past.  Both those assumptions are incorrect in my personal experience.  Key issues with the whole time thing in this particular protocol are:

• If you’ve been trained in remote viewing, you know that unless the viewer is self-judging the session, you never show the viewer anything except the true target—even if the session is completely wrong.  And if you’re having someone transmit to the viewer, you don’t have the transmitter to ever see anything except the correct target. My partner in this experiment should never have been allowed to see anything except the correct target.  Because he was allowed to see all four “possible” clips at the same time as I was judging them, it’s entirely possible that his continued “telepathy” would distract and muddy the situation.  He watched the possible targets while I did, and he heard all my comments back to the experimenter during the judging session, as well as the comments I made during the session itself.  (I couldn’t hear anything he said.)  Since he actually viewed all four clips…which one was the one I was supposed to identify as the target that “he viewed”?   He actually viewed ALL of them…just not all of them during the “transmission” time of the experiment.
• More fundamentally wrong, however, is that you can remote view the past and future as easily as you can the present.  By not acknowledging that, the protocol was fundamentally flawed.

As it happened, the night before the experiment, I did a remote viewing session on the video clip that would be shown to my friend the next day.  In the car on the way to the lab, I read aloud to him my notes of the previous night’s session.

He knew…and I had proof in the car through my notes from the session the night before…that I had totally nailed the video clip.  It was a dead-on hit.   He told me when we were driving away at the end of the day that he almost fell out of his chair laughing when he saw the actual clip because it was a perfect match to what I’d described to him on the way there.

So, to my own satisfaction, I demonstrated that remote viewing is easily possible violating the narrow constraints of linear time.

I should also say that I’m very ambivalent about the reality of telepathy—that is of perceiving someone else’s thoughts.  I’ve only rarely had glimmerings of that skill, and I’m not sure how or even if it exists.  On the other hand, I am totally convinced that “telempathy” exists—in other words, knowing the emotional state of someone far away from you.  I’ve had numerous instances where I tune into other people’s emotions, generally unexpectedly.  There was a time when I had a friend to whom I used to say, “you stub your toe, and I say, ‘ouch,’” because I was so tuned into their state of being.  (Made him excruciatingly uncomfortable, by the way.  And I don’t blame him for that; it made me uncomfortable too!)  And another friend, going through a severe personal crisis, used to wake me up in the middle of the night (from about 35 miles away!) from his mental screaming from the emotional agony he was going through.  I had to work very hard to turn that ability down and learn to control that “telempathy” thing because for a while it really did affect my ability to function.

3. You shared a wonderful story about your cat, Sammy. Do you continue to make contact with him? Do you think he’s currently in a realm with other animals, or is he in some kind of universal realm on the other side?

Sammy was/is a very special kitty.  I do believe that often our pets are really here as our spiritual guides, angels, and protectors.  If nothing else, they teach us about unconditional love.  Sometimes they also provide physical protection, but often they serve to gently nudge us along a spiritual path.  That was definitely the case with Sammy.

I realized, even before he died, that he was an extremely “old soul.”  (And I have met many other animals who are equally “old souls.”)  His spiritual calling is to help shepherd others, mostly animals, but sometimes people like me, into lifting themselves spiritually.  He chooses to take an animal form because that makes it easier for his “clients” (I almost want to use the word “flock”) to relate to him. He’s non-threatening and sweet and cuddly as a cat, much more so than if he took human or some other form.

Yes, I do keep in touch with him, and he is a spiritual leader.  He has not reincarnated and I don’t think he has plans to do so anytime soon. Instead, he helps animals transition from life to afterlife, and helps guide them spiritually.  Whenever I go visit him, he’s always surrounded by animals, mostly pets, but some wild animals too.  I’ve seen various deer, bears, chipmunks, lizards, all kinds of animals learning from him.

At Vision Intuitives, we work a lot with animal communications. And we volunteer with various animal rescue agencies to help them with animals that have been traumatized.  It’s not too uncommon to work with animals coming to the end of their physical lives.  When I have a client animal who is likely to pass over, I always try to introduce the animal to Sammy, and tell the animal that Sammy will stay with him/her and guide and assist him so that his transition won’t be so scary.  And of course, in the book I talk about doing the “soul retrieval” on one of the Mars landers; I passed that little guy’s soul into Sammy’s more-than-capable hands, er, paws.

I do have one amusing story about Sammy that happened after the book came out.  I had a friend who had a miniature black poodle named Sunny who was clearly getting ready to pass over.  Sunny had a disposition just like his name, and was bright and charming and a total chick-magnet.  (Just ask him!)  When it was clear that the end was coming soon, I decided to introduce Sunny to Sammy as a guide and helper.  I sat with Sunny on my lap, connected to him and explained that I wanted to introduce him to someone who would stay with him and help him until he had passed.  All went pretty well—until I invited Sammy to make an appearance.  Sunny’s reaction was astonishing:  “That’s a cat!  You expect me to listen to and be guided by a cat?   I chase cats.   Find me another guide or helper or I’ll just do it myself.  Hmmph.”

Ahem.  I guess we all have our prejudices.

4. In the book, you talked about your guide, Click. Do you still communicate with Click? Have you gained anymore insight about Click? Have you gained anymore insight from Click?

I think that our guides are frequently, if not always, pieces of our higher selves that we have to integrate.  About 2 years after I first met Click, I found myself in a deep session and literally felt him integrate with me, making me more whole.  So I don’t exactly communicate with Click any longer.  Instead, Click is now part of me.

Of course, shortly after Click was gone, I was introduced to another whole set of guides, the key one of which I call “B.T.” because the first time I met him, he looked like a “blobby thingy” to me.  (His response to that:  “That’s Mr. Blobby Thingy to you!”)  B.T. has the most outrageous sense of humor I’ve ever encountered.  Seriously.  I never know what to expect from him.  He shows up unexpectedly, and in the oddest costumes—everything from a 1950s-era little boy’s cowboy suit, complete with cap pistol, cowboy chaps, and oversized hat, to a giant chicken suit, kind of like Big Bird but as a chicken instead of, well, whatever Big Bird is.  Once he was even dressed like a giant Hershey’s chocolate kiss.  I guess he was feeling “smoochy” that day.

I still wish I knew why the chicken suit, though.

B.T. and Click are part of the reason why my dear friend Charles, whose passing I discuss in the final chapter of Suddenly Psychic, once asked me if it bothered me that my guides all seem to come from the stand-up comic section of the Guides R Us store.

5. You mentioned that “…spirit guides can sometimes have a somewhat strange sense of humor.” This is something I frequently hear about. Can you elaborate on this?

Well, B.T. is the classic example of a truly strange sense of humor.  I was doing one meditation, a very, very deep one, serious, profound.  I was deep into the Focus levels, well out into the Focus-40s, as I recall.  It was one of those spiritually uplifting, profound moments that come too rarely for my taste.  Then…I turned around…and there was B.T. in the chicken suit, squawking and preening and generally being funnier than all get out.

I totally fell apart laughing.  It blew me right out of the profound meditation I’d been doing, and right back to C-1 consciousness.

So, why did he do that??  What message was there in that?

Guides seem to have their own agendas that don’t necessarily agree with what we want to do.  On that occasion, I wanted to do a spiritually deep and profound meditation.  B.T. wanted something quite different.  Guess who won?  (Not me.)

Our guides can’t make us do anything, as I understand it.  They nudge.  They prod.  They advise.  They encourage.  They use any tactic they can think of to get us to improve ourselves spiritually.  And if that means sending us into gales of laughter, well…that’s what they do.

6. Following the Yellow Brick Road is one of my favorite chapters. In it, you discussed the concept of a multidimensional universe. Do you think all of the nonphysical dimensions (i.e. dimensions beyond four-dimensional space-time) are spiritual in nature? How do you think they’re segmented? Are they arranged in a sort of spiritual hierarchy?

Yes, I do think that the super-dimensions (that is, the dimensions outside our 3 spatial and 1 time dimension) become more and more spiritual.  Perhaps, if we learn to operate as 11-dimensional beings instead of 4-dimensional ones, we will be in that state of total Oneness with All.  Maybe that’s what God is.

I also believe these extra dimensions are totally orthogonal to our 4-dimensional perceptions, which is why in our physics, they appear so small as to be negligible—subatomic-particle sized.  As I talk about in the book, we’re firmly fixed in “Flatland” of 4-dimensional space-time.  The trick is to lift ourselves outside that.  I don’t know if or when it will be possible to do that physically, but apparently we can do it spiritually.

In terms of hierarchy…you know that’s interesting.  There are clearly hierarchies here in 4-D-land (our “Flatland”).  Ken Wilber, the philosopher, has constructed a highly elaborate totally hierarchical construct of spiritual and social and physical and technical growth.  And I know a bunch of really smart people who have all bought into that description of reality.  Only problem is, it seems to me that it’s firmly rooted in 4-D-land.

While it’s true that the Focus levels from C-1 (waking consciousness) to F-49 are clearly hierarchical, when I go out beyond F-49, into the territory beyond the hierarchy of focus states that are more commonly explored, my sense is that the focus levels are no longer hierarchical at all.  Instead they are all aspects of One.  I’m not sure that there’s any real meaning to “higher” and “lower” past F-49.  It feels more like F-27.  When you go to F-27, you realize it’s a huge level.  There are tons of “centers” there:  a Park, where the newly arrived meet and greet their previously departed loved ones; a learning center where spiritual growth and training takes place; a planning center where your next incarnation is planned for the life lessons you’ll deal with, etc.; a storage area for most people’s Akashic records; a healing center where the emotional and spiritual traumas of physical reality are healed; an operations or control center; a whole similar set of centers for non-terrestrial beings; an equally similar set of centers for animals; individual “special places” for rest, contemplation, and recuperation…just tons of places.  Is that a hierarchy of locations?  Not really.  They’re all there at the same level.  You just go to the section that you most need or want at that moment.  They’re all part of what makes up the one level of F-27.

My experience beyond F-49 in F-253, where I was allowed to perceive myself as being One with the Mind of God, convinced me that all hierarchies (like time) are cultural myths.  Yes, they’re important here in physical human life, mostly because (just like time) we all believe that they’re important.  But as you become more and more spiritual, you recognize that when you are One with God, there is no such thing as a hierarchy.  How can there be?  To have a hierarchy, you must have at least Two…one to be above and one to be below.  But if you have Two, you cannot be in the state of Oneness with God.

So to me, the whole purpose of life, both physical and spiritual, is to stop seeing the Truth as a hierarchy or a development path from better to worse, or lower to higher.  The purpose has to be to see yourself as merely One with everything.  If you can see things that way, there can be no hierarchy at all.

Obviously, human culture is a long, long way from attaining that state as a whole. I do believe that there are individuals who manage to achieve it, at least in certain moments, if not consistently.  Those are the people we need to emulate and learn from.

7. In the chapter Beyond the Pale, you talked about the Akashic Field Theory. Do you think the Akashic Field is the same thing as the Zero-Point Field in quantum physics?

Not quite.  Laszlo’s Akashic Field Theory doesn’t seem to be the same as Zero Point energy field.  And if you look at Amit Gotswami’s (Professor Emeritus of Physics from Oregon) concept of an underlying spiritual scalar field, it’s really similar to Laszlo’s field, but there are differences.  I think all three are perhaps different aspects or different attempts to describe the same thing, but none are yet 100% successful.  Yet all three of those approaches seem to me to be among the most accurate depictions of fundamental reality.

8. Do you plan on writing another book of this nature in the future?

Tentatively yes.  Nothing is set in stone at the moment, but I hope to have news I can share within a few weeks.

If you want to keep up with what I’m doing, the best way is with my blog: theparanoidwriter.wordpress.com or with either of my websites: VisionIntuitives.com or www.MaureenCaudill.com

You can buy “Suddenly Psychic” here.