Russell Targ, physicist, author and consciousness research pioneer is renowned for his work in remote viewing. He is also series editor of Studies in Consciousness, a collection of classic texts on the scientific study of consciousness, newly re-issued by Hampton Roads. Spend an evening with physicist Russell Targ at East West Bookstore Friday, March 4. Attend an all-day seminar on Saturday, March 5. Thank you to Susanne Spitzer and the folks at East West Bookstore for providing the following:

SUSANNE SPITZER: What cultural shift have you noticed since the first publication of Mind Reach in 1977?

RUSSELL TARG: I'd say the book is more successful now than when we started, because our work has been replicated at Princeton University, Edinburgh University, Utrecht and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. All over the world, people have been successfully doing remote viewing. We also have been published in the most prestigious scientific magazines in the world. We definitely have made progress.

SS: You handpicked the classics in this Hampton Rhodes collection of Studies in Consciousness. How did you decide what to select?

RT: My criterion was that the author must have actually done something or had specific experiences. All of these books deal with either personal experiences, or even more to the point, experiments that people have done.

In Dream Telepathy, for example, experiments were done in the 1960's where the head of the hospital, Montague Ullman, and researcher Stan Krippner, had people dream each night about pictures they would be shown when they awakened in the morning.

In An Experiment with Time, William Dunne wrote about dreams that he had of future events. He was an engineer, and night after night he would dream correctly of things that he would read about or experience the next day.

SS: Did Dunne's capacity to dream the future arise spontaneously and then he decided to track it?

RT: That's right. He began to have these dreams and then recorded them. He believed, as a scientist, that what's happening in the future exists, and we are caught in a spider web of past, present and future, where the future is tugging on us to bring about the already existent future, so that what we dream is caused by the future. You have the future affecting the past.

In Mental Radio, Upton Sinclair discovered that his wife often knew what he was thinking—that's an experience that many of us have. As an investigative reporter, he would go to one part of his house and make a drawing, and discovered that his wife, Mary Craig, was able to reproduce his drawings. Albert Einstein, who was their friend at Princeton, witnessed these experiments and introduced the book, saying it was an important work.

In all these books, the work was done generally throughout the early part of the 20th century. They are actual experimental findings by very smart people. I wanted to bring their findings back into a series of essential books for people who wanted to get in touch with their own psychic sense, so they could learn what these great pioneers had to say.

SS: Would you please speak about your upcoming events at East West?

RT: The first night, I'll talk about the wonderful books in this series and what their relevance is for today. The next day, I will show people how to do remote viewing. I'll describe the scientific and spiritual implications of psychic ability. We've become very skillful in helping people get in touch with the psychic part of themselves. I can show them how to describe an object in a bag, look into the future and see what they're going to experience the next day. We will learn to separate psychic signals from the mental noise and to function increasingly as psychic people.