Russell Targ: laser physicist, ESP pioneer

PALO ALTO, California - A visitor to Russell Targ's house is greeted by the expected quiet accoutrements of a home inhabited by intellectuals, including piles of books and comfortable deep furniture. But it quickly becomes apparent that there is more than meets the eye in the home that Targ, an author and physicist, shares with his wife, Patricia.

A visitor can find the Targs' home by sound alone, as the soft swish of running water from the fountain in the home's entrance carries down the sidewalk. Inside, the wooden glow of modernist California architecture, abundant green plant life and the fountain's murmur bring the outside in. The home is a creative space, with wild possibilities. A hallway painting, "Enchanted Love," offers an eye-catching dream vision of a disembodied couple against a surreal landscape.

Targ's puckish sense of humor occasionally emerges from behind his owlish glasses when you might expect it least. A visitor should know in advance that any serious conversation with him won't be easy. Still, you can be sure that if you persevere, a conversation with Targ will be most interesting, with some unexpected twists and turns.

Targ is no intellectual slouch. He was able to bypass high school and entered graduate school at age 20. He can dissect Mary Daly's radical feminist theology and in the same breath sketch out an ancient Buddhist sage's sense of the self and other.

A physicist who retired in 1997 as a senior engineer at Lockheed Martin, Targ ran a program developing remote laser sensing in order to detect the wind shear (turbulence) that can bring down airliners.

One of his claims to fame is research and writing on what he calls "remote viewing." Think of it as knowing things that you shouldn't be able to know. Including extra-sensory perception or ESP. Including what's behind stage magic. And possibly even including "knowing" future investment returns.

To some people, this sounds eccentric and kooky. But remember that Targ is a scientist through and through, very grounded in the physical universe.

Targ first encountered laser research as a young man, when he met Gordon Gould (now the patent holder for the laser) at Columbia in the 1950s. They worked together on some of the earliest methods to focus beams of photons. Over the next five decades, Targ's research roamed through a variety of fields but returned again and again to the science of amplified light.

Ask him a question about lasers and he replies with aesthetic relish, describing the often-unseen phenomena with admiration.

"Everyone likes intense, colored lights. They're full of surprise," he said. "They're not at all sterile and mechanical; they're energetic and beautiful."

He enjoys gently sparring with an interviewer over research that explodes conceptual divides that have been profoundly disturbing to thinkers as great as Einstein.

As a teenage graduate student, Targ's curiosity led him to moonlight as a stage magician, where he found a blend of physics and psychology. He became curious about psychological phenomena and how they could be explained through physics, particularly by the new field of quantum theory.

In 1972 Targ co-founded a program at the Stanford Research Institute to investigate how human awareness can extend across time and space, a process described as remote viewing. That phrase is part of the title of a book Targ wrote called "Limitless Mind: A guide to remote viewing and transformation of consciousness."

The SRI program, begun during the height of the Cold War, drew the attention of government scientists and army intelligence.

"We were the X-Files," Targ said, deadpan. "One of the best arguments supporting the existence of some kind of psychic function is that these highly skeptical, hardnosed military agencies continued to support us to the tune of $25 million over a period of 23 years."

The government's goal: Targ and his colleagues would help agents get in touch with their psychic selves, in order to spy on the Russians and Chinese. Targ went to Russia as a guest of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

Many people like theories and explanations that are neat, tidy and predictable. But Targ has an unusually high tolerance for ambiguity. That's necessary if you're going to tangle with quantum physics.

"Modern physics is quite comfortable with things neither being true nor not true," he says. "The undergraduate physics student goes crazy trying to understand whether light is a wave or not a wave." Targ says that's the wrong question. Light (photons) can be a wave, or not a wave, or both, or neither, he said.

The phenomenon of entanglement, an odd effect in which photons affect each other even when separated by a great distance, has irked generations of scientists, including even Einstein, who labeled it "spooky action at a distance." For Targ, such spooks and vagaries resonate with profound philosophical significance.

Ready for more? There's "nonlocality," the notion that objects beyond just entangled photons can affect each other when separated by space - and even time. This idea was originated in 1927 by Erwin Schroedinger, an accomplished physicist. The theory, founded in quantum physics, swiftly became significant to another set of researchers, those fascinated by parapsychology and the extrasensory powers of the mind.

Think ESP.

While he was in Russia, Targ collaborated with Soviet colleagues who were also experimenting in telepathy and precognition. The Russian psychic Djuna Davitashvili conducted a much-reported experiment with Targ and the Stanford Research Institute. "I interviewed her at her Moscow apartment as to where a colleague of mine, in San Francisco, would go two hours in the future," Targ said.

Neither she nor Targ had information about where that colleague would go. The colleague himself wouldn't decide his destination until, his watch synchronized with Targ's, after the Russian psychic made her prediction. Could she "know" where he would go?

"It worked just fine on two occasions," Targ said. In one instance, Davitashvili predicted that Targ's co-worker would enter "a big building devoted to a famous man and a famous book associated with that man." She described candlelight and numerous people coming and going to celebrate this man, whom she did not name.

The location selected by his San Francisco agent: San Francisco's beautiful Grace Cathedral atop Nob Hill.

Does this prove anything? Maybe not. But are you willing to dismiss it as nothing more than a lucky guess?

Targ believes focused awareness has the potential to increase human well-being. His daughter Elisabeth, a psychiatrist, researched spiritual healing. She convened a group of experienced spiritual healers to pray for 30 AIDS patients with whom she was working, in a double blind study that included 30 other AIDS patients.

The patients who were the object of this spiritual prayer "had fewer trips to the hospital, fewer opportunistic illnesses and better mental health" than the control group who did not receive the spiritual healers' attention, Targ said.

Targ believes the healers somehow influenced the immune systems of his daughter's 30 patients.

You might wonder: Is Targ a psychic investor?

In 1982, 18 years before he became a Merriman client, Targ tried his hand. "We were successful for nine attempts over nine weeks at forecasting changes in the silver commodities market," he said. "We made $120,000," certainly a sizeable amount in 1982.

Targ now invests conventionally, choosing to play by the same rules as everybody else. "People who are able to move their awareness into spaciousness," a term that Targ uses to describe what many people think of as ESP, "find that they would just rather not use it for that kind of application," he said.

"You can do a lot of things with ESP: find a car key, locate a parking place or make money in the silver market," he said. "But the most important thing you can do is find out who you are. If you don't know who you are, life is just filled with bad decisions."

Targ has moved toward becoming a practicing Buddhist over the years. He cites a common wisdom shared by the Buddhists, Sufis, and Gnostics: "You don't have to believe anything, just be quiet and experience the divine directly. It's the sit-down-and-shut-up spiritual path."

He recalls he was nervous when he went on tour to promote his new book on spirituality, "The End of Suffering: Fearless Living in Troubled Times."

"I was very comfortable lecturing on lasers, which is what I did for decades, or lecturing on ESP experiments and experimental outcomes. I was concerned that I would embarrass myself talking about emptiness, that people in Silicon Valley won't put up with that."

Then, he said, "I realized that there is no self to be embarrassed, the self is just a story I made up. I internalized that and felt better immediately."

Targ relates this in a matter-of-fact manner, as if reporting on something he had discovered as part of a lifetime of observation guided by the scientific process.

Research into remote viewing has been experiencing exponential growth, particularly via the internet. He has discovered, for example, more than a million citations at Google.com to "remote viewing." Still, the concept is not widely accepted as legitimate. The mass media don't report on the subject for one reason, Targ said: No one knows how it works.

"We live in a largely materialistic society that doesn't really want to get involved in something that looks nonphysical, or looks like God did it," he said. "We are allergic to mysticism."

Nonetheless, he has published in prestigious scientific journals such as Nature and the Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. At a recent conference of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science he presented a paper on "retrocausality", the investigation of how the future affects the past (as in the case of the visit by Targ's colleague to Grace Cathedral, which reached Davitashvili's awareness two hours before it had happened).

"That's the most exciting thing that I'm working on now, trying to understand the nature of causality," Targ said. "As a physicist, it is clear to me that there are great misapprehensions about space and time. The idea that we have non-local awareness is intensely exciting. I have lots to occupy myself."

There is an urgency to Targ's determination to stay busy during his retirement. One of the inspirations for his book "The End of Suffering" was his colleagues' experience at Lockheed.

"I observed that people die very shortly after retiring," he said. "It became clear to me that all these people were dying because their identity was taken away from them. At 65, Lockheed takes away your badge and tears up your business cards. Suddenly you're nothing, after being senior engineer for a lifetime.

"It is critically important that a worker have some self-awareness and identification of himself outside of his work. Otherwise he becomes 'nothing' when he retires. He should start cultivating outside interests that include social and spiritual support before he retires," Targ said. "I was so relieved when I got out of the Lockheed pressure cooker that I came home and cried."

He still teaches, offering workshops on how to quiet the mind and attempt remote viewing, and translates and writes about early mystic texts.

Targ just stopped riding his Honda 250 motorcycle, his preferred mode of travel for the last 35 years even though he is legally blind.

When he periodically went to the California Department of Motor Vehicles to renew his license, "I had to use my ability to cloud their minds, to let me drive year after year even though I couldn't see the chart," he said, probably joking.

After tearing through the northern California foothills, rain or shine, Targ gave it up at age 72. "Traffic has become denser, less respectful," he said. "There's more suffering in Silicon Valley." His use of that phrase echoes the title of his newest book, which projects solutions to that very sort of suffering.

He and Patricia met about eight years ago at a lecture where Targ was offering one of his earlier books, "Miracles of Mind," to a local publisher. "I sold the book, and as a dividend I met my beloved wife," Targ teased. "It was a great synchronicity."

Patricia, an artist and student of Buddhism as well as a retired elementary school teacher, already had an affinity for spiritual matters and came into the relationship well prepared to appreciate Targ's kookier side.

He and Patricia enjoy traveling together, and they enjoyed recounting their explorations in northern Italy. "Italian women are profoundly more psychic than the women of Silicon Valley," Targ said while Patricia kept a straight face. "A woman there told me, 'Everybody knows that Italian women are the most beautiful, the most sexy-- why wouldn't they also be the most psychic?'

"I think what she was saying is that they are the most free, the most uninhibited. For them, psychic ability is not forbidden."

Russell and Patricia demonstrate a similar spirit of imaginative independence. They appreciate Targ's research as much for the pursuit of pleasure as for the discovery of obscure powers.

At home with the Targs, a visitor can't help but participate in their celebration of creativity. The soothing, unlikely sibilance of running water against the urban landscape, the gleefully naive rainbow colors of a painting's fantasy landscape - these define a space of permission, where thinking and feeling intertwine.

For Targ, spiritual involvement is integral to intellectual freedom. To him, the combination is immensely satisfying.