Questions & Answers with Russell Targ and J.J. Hurtak

1What was your purpose in writing this book?

The End Of Suffering shows step-by-step, how we can learn to surrender the story of who we think we are, and experience the end of our suffering. Of course, everyone experiences suffering. But, that suffering is by and large unnecessary. Our goal is to provide direct experience of the fact that the peace, love, and spaciousness we are all looking for is already within us--it is who we are! This practical guide brings together the enduring teachings of the East on peacefulness and self-realization, and puts them into a modern framework emphasizing experience over belief.

2If this is a self-help book, what does it offer that we haven't heard before?

This book demonstrates that the dualistic logic of Aristotle is a significant source of suffering today. It is through Aristotle's writings on non-contradiction that we are falsely taught that we and the Divine are separate -- rather than one. Our book introduces a new system of thought. It helps us to change our mode of thinking, without which we cannot change our reality. Using a new holistic, non-local window of perception, we see the greater plan of Life. This leads to the excitement of discovery of who we are which alone is one of humankind's greatest adventures. Suffering retreats and disappears.

3Don't the Buddhists say something like that about dualistic thinking? What does that actually mean?

Buddha taught us to live helpful and compassionate lives, and to surrender our ego to the peace of spaciousness. This Mahayana middle path was greatly expanded by the Second Century genius Nagarjuna. Whereas Aristotle taught that an idea is either true of false, Nagarjuna demonstrated that most things are neither true, nor not true. The so-called complementarity of waves and particles in modern physics support this view, along with the famous indeterminacy theorem of Kurt Gödel. The modern physics of nonlocality and our own laboratory experience with remote viewing (psychical) research all show our potential for experiencing expanded awareness. This book is a uniquely understandable treatment of Nagarjuna's peerless teachings on logical thought and emptiness. The Dalai Lama described Nagarjuna as one of the truly enlightened people of all time. We describe a peaceful and joyful path based on these teachings.

4You say that rock stars have a special problem in being peaceful?

Marilyn Monroe and many of our most beloved and immensely popular superstars paid a great price for their wealth, power, and incandescent fame. By their constant exposure to huge audiences of manic and adoring fans, these performers open themselves to having their true self sucked right out of their body, and having it replaced by a false self projected upon them by their fans. Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison (of The Doors), Jimmy Hendrix, and Elvis Presley, "the King," all died young as a result of self-inflicted drug overdoses. These Dionysian characters with their pink Cadillacs allowed themselves to be psychically torn apart by the fans, just as the ecstatic followers (meneads) of the mythic Dionysius would tear animals apart and devour their raw flesh as part of their frenzy.

5Are all celebrities affected by this problem?

No, there are some like Madonna, Carlos Santana and in the past the Beatles who have sought ways to alleviate these problems. They chose a greater inner spiritual pathway. They saw their music and their artistic work as important, but at the same time, they used it to transform themselves. They had devoted spouses who kept them grounded, and they eventually found mind-quieting meditation and a spiritual teacher or mystical teaching, like the Kabbalah. They discovered, in their passion for life, "about something" outside of themselves and the ringing telephone.

6Can you summarize the steps you recommend for what you call "getting out of hell free?"

First of all we talk about embracing oneness. The idea that we are all one, in consciousness. Every time you create a separation through judgment, you create suffering -- usually for yourself.

Second: It is essential to find a way to quiet on ongoing mental chatter, through some sort of daily meditation or self reflection.

Third: Compassion is also critical, because as you expand your awareness you will notice that there is no peace for you until there is peace for everyone. That's why watching TV news causes so much pain.

Fourth: Becoming part of a supportive spiritual community is perhaps the most important element of a peaceful life. It doesn't have to be a church. But an investment club won't do.

Finally: Reflect positive thinking and be in touch with your own flow of loving awareness. And don't go to sleep with the TV news.

7How did you as a physicist get interested in the end of suffering?

I, Targ, worked for more than a decade at Lockheed Missiles & Space, and observed with some alarm, that men who retired at 65, after a lifetime of employment, would frequently die in the next two or three years, where they would normally be expected to live to eighty! I now understand that this comes from their mistaken belief that who you are, is defined by what is says on your business card. We are teaching that your card is just a story.

8What is the remote viewing you describe?

After more than two decades and $20 million at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), we showed that ordinary people visiting our laboratory could learn to accurately describe and experience what was going on at distant places, even for locations hundreds or thousands of miles away. With practice, any person can learn to do what we named "remote viewing." This capacity shows that our human potential is much grander than most people suppose.

9Why should we be interested in remote viewing?

Remote viewing gives us access to what physicists call non-local awareness, and what a healer calls our spiritual community. It gives us direct contact with who we are as timeless awareness that fills all of space and time -- not just a body! It is actually an invitation to claim our ability as human beings to participate in a larger non-local world that is not limited by the ordinary constraints of distance and time. By quieting our random mental chatter, we can expand our awareness of who we are, and what we are capable of. These spiritual perspectives beyond the purely material offer us opportunities for more meaningful and peaceful lives. In addition, access to non-local awareness provides a toolbox allowing us to do many things that may seem unrelated, such as healing the sick, locating parking spaces, and even forecasting the stock market.

10What does this kind of psychic ability have to do with the spiritual healing that you also talk about in your book?

We all have these human capacities that entail mind-to-mind connections. Worldwide psychic research data from more than 50 years show conclusively that our awareness is able to transcend distance and time, and come back with useful information. In remote viewing, our mind experiences distant places and events. For the spiritual healer, this connection is achieved by surrendering awareness to God or the Divine, and through this, making a mind-to-mind connection with the patient. Energy healers do it by themselves.

11What do you mean by non-local mind?

Non-local connections were first described by Einstein in the 1930s, and non-local mind has been discussed by Dr. Larry Dossey in his recent books. It refers to the Buddhist idea that separation of consciousness is an illusion, and the data show that we are actually connected in surprising ways to points in space-time that appear distant to us. It is an important idea, indicating that we greatly underestimate the extent to which we are interconnected with each other.

12Is remote viewing like an out-of-body experience?

Remote viewing exists on a continuum, from simple seeing a distant location on your own internal mental screen; to a full blown out-of-body experience, in which you take with you as much of your awareness, sensitivity, or sexuality as you are comfortable with. At SRI we kept it simple, because we didn't want anyone to have a frightening experience.

13Were you ever able to tell our government's intelligence agency anything useful, that they didn't know before you told them?

During the Cold War, one of our talented remote viewers, who was actually a policeman, drew pictures of a secret Soviet weapons laboratory, and accurately described the particle beam weapons systems under construction. Four years later, after the viewer had died, this information was verified by US spy satellites. The detailed information conveyed in these drawings was considered to be highly valuable by special congressional committees as well as the CIA. We accurately reported on the health of our hostages in Iran. These are just a few of hundreds of remarkable cases, most of which are still classified.

14How do you learn remote viewing?

At SRI we taught hundreds of people how to do remote viewing. It is so simple that there are now more than 980,000 remote viewing sites on Google. We describe in detail how remote viewing works, so that a person will have enough information to practice with a friend and learn to do it surprisingly well. It requires learning to separate the mental noise of memory, imagination, naming, and analysis from the psychic signal.

15What does modern physics have to say about this?

We live in a world governed by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Kurt G�del's famous incompleteness theorem, Einstein's universe of nonlocality, and the world of quantum-interconnectedness of physicist David Bohm. That leaves plenty of room for remote viewing. Our work has been replicated in labs all over the world, and we have published our results in distinguished scientific journals.

16Do you have to believe in God to develop psychic abilities?

For the purposes of this book, we can consider God as a universal experience. This is in line with David Cooper's ideas in his book "God Is A Verb." You don't have to believe in God to do remote viewing, but nonbelievers may be surprised to discover that they are part of a larger spiritual community that they didn't know existed.

17Does that mean that you think that psychic abilities are sacred or religious?

Not necessarily. We believe that psychic abilities are natural perceptual capabilities that are available to us all, to incorporate into our lives, and greatly expand our awareness of who we are and the world we live in. Ultimately, remote viewing and psychic healing inspire us by revealing the extent to which we are connected to each other and to the world, transcending the ordinary limits of bodies, space and time.

18If precognition tells us about the future, can we change the future if we don't like what we psychically see, or is it all determined?

We don't know the answer for certain. But I (Targ) do know that one of our CIA contract monitors had a frightening dream about being in an airplane crash. He cancelled his flight, and lived to see his traveling companion killed in the crash, as my friend drove away from the airport. I believe that there is good data suggesting that you can use your precognitive dreams, to change your future.

19From all your research, what part of the finding are you most confident about?

It is absolutely clear that remote viewing is a nonlocal ability and we can learn to experience that spaciousness. It is no harder to describe and experience something a thousand miles away, than it is to describe something across the street. That is, the distance doesn't matter. The same is true about time. It is just as easy to describe tomorrow's newspaper picture, as it is to describe today's hidden photo.