If you haven’t read Dan Brown’s adrenaline packed thrill ride The Secret of Secrets yet then go buy a copy now. It’s a great read, but it’s more important than that. It’s the best researched portrayal of extra-sensory perception, remote viewing and non-local consciousness of 2025. Multiplying that with it’s wide audience, I’m hoping it can make a big contribution to public awareness and understanding of psi phenomena.

I’m not going to deal with some of the more sensational aspects of the story here (no spoilers!), but I want to break down this one paragraph and clear up some common misconceptions.

So let’s start from the bottom and work our way up!

“A mind unrestrained by locality” #

Locality is the notion that cause and effect must travel in an unbroken chain through time and space. Like one billiard ball striking the next and so on. You read these words on your screen: photons travel into your eyeball, your brain decodes the pattern of light into words, then into concepts, and you get my drift. This is how reality seems to work. But it’s not how it actually works.

The 2022 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for research which proved the universe is not “locally real”. “Real” here means things have properties independent of being observed. Locality, the paragraph above.

Of course those scientists could have just asked Leonard Cohen and saved themselves 30 years, but science is is slow to discover in the outer world what mystics have known to be true in the inner world for millennia.

It’s coming from the feel
That it ain’t exactly real
Or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there

Leonard Cohen (Democracy, 1992)

So reality (or unreality, whatever) is non-local, but what about the non-locality of mind? Not brain. Mind. Mind is the phenomenon we experience; our thoughts and our awareness. The brain is an organ which seems to have something to do with that phenomenon, but the evidence piles high (e.g. veridical near death experiences) that mind is separate from brain and can exist without it. There’s even a recent-ish case of a French civil servant who was found to be missing most of his brain yet carrying on a perfectly normal life. It’s a funny old world.

What does it mean for mind to be non-local? #

It means that changes in the phenomena of mind can happen without a Local cause. One practical upshot of this is that we can perceive things at a distance (in time as well as space) which are not perceptible by our physical senses. This is known as extra-sensory perception (ESP), or in the language of The Secret of Secrets, non-local consciousness.

Remote Viewing is a powerful though slightly geeky subset of this. All Remote Viewing involves ESP, but not all ESP is Remote Viewing. What separates Remote Viewing from other forms of ESP the most strongly is that remote viewers are blind to the target - that is, they are not given any information at all about what it is they are to describe. This way, we know that - when they do describe whatever-it-was - that they perceived it non-locally.

Mind IS non-local. Your mind, my mind - everybody’s mind.

For one thing, the evidence suggests that mind does not emerge from the the physical matter of the brain (although some will disagree with me on that) and is therefore not subject to the limitations of Local causality upon the brain.

And for another, if your brain is Local then it’s not Real, so it’s not restricted to Local causation anyway, because nothing is.

It’s one thing to understand this intellectually - to think that this might be true - but it’s quite another thing to know it to be true. This is why I’m so passionate about running Beginners’ Remote Viewing Workshops.

My beginners workshops give normal people with no special abilities or training the direct personal experience that their awareness is non-local. That our awareness literally transcends time and space. It’s an idea so crazy that you really need to experience it to believe it. And the madness of it all is that it’s really not that hard to do! This fact has profound implications for how we understand ourselves and live our lives.

Aren’t you just trying to sell me a….? #

No - I want people to experience this for themselves. Fortunately you can do so for free. Zero investment. You need a pen and paper and about 20 minutes. Follow this 100% free Beginners’ Guide to Remote Viewing and see for yourself.

“Consciousness can view what is happening in remote locations” #

This is true, but it’s not the half of it. This idea is more accurate if we make it much broader: we can perceive non-locally.

One big misconception about Remote Viewing is that it’s about viewing. So it’s not a great name, but we’re stuck with it for historical reasons. While remote viewers do often perceive visually, we actually use all our senses, as well as “just knowing” things¹. Neither are we restricted to perceiving sensory data through the “correct” channel: a person might “just know” that the thing they’re trying to describe is orange, or they might see a mental image of a wooded valley to convey the idea that something is natural. This is a big topic for another day. But the takeaway here is that Remote Viewing isn’t just about viewing. It’s about perception. Remote Perception would have been a better name, but hindsight is a wonderful thing and Remote Viewing has stuck.

We can perceive non-locally. This is very useful if you’re in dire need of information you can’t get any other way. 39th president of the USA Jimmy Carter certainly thought this was pretty cool, and you should too.

There was only one instance that I’ll talk about now. We had a plane go down in the Central African Republic—a twinengine plane, small plane. And we couldn’t find it. And so we oriented satellites that were going around the earth every ninety minutes to fly over that spot where we thought it might be and take photographs. We couldn’t find it. So the director of the CIA came and told me that he had contacted a woman in California that claimed to have supernatural capabilities. And she went in a trance, and she wrote down latitudes and longitudes, and we sent our satellite over that latitude and longitude, and there was the plane.

The Gospel According to Jimmy | GQ. (n.d.). Retrieved 8 January 2026, from https://www.gq.com/story/jimmy-carter-ted-kennedy-ufo-republicans

Another common misconception is to assume that because our perception is non-local, that the thing we’re perceiving must have its own locality. To think that it’s information from one place (the remote viewer’s target) somehow travelling to another place (wherever the remote viewer is). In fact, we can perceive information which does not have a location.

Where is the result of that soccer match next week?

Where is the change to your product which will boost sales?

Where are the secret ulterior motives of that new CFO you’re thinking of hiring?

Where is pi?

All these are types of information we can get with Remote Viewing, yet none of them have a physical location. This shows us that not only does our awareness transcend time and physical space, it’s actually perceiving in the realm of mind - or consciousness - not (just) of matter.

Remote viewers can describe things which don’t exist, or don’t exist yet, or existed in the past, or which might or might not happen, or which or exist entirely in the imagination. They can describe dreams, conspiracy theories, abstract concepts and more. If it can be described, a remote viewer can describe it.

Does consciousness leave the body during remote viewing? #

Is a remote viewer “projecting his consciousness out of his body … freeing it from its local bonds … and letting it materialize effortlessly anywhere in the world”? Yeah, no. Or at least, not necessarily.

Out of Body Experiences (OBEs, sometimes also “Astral Projection”) are a well documented phenomenon. These tend to be very immersive experiences, often with the sensation of leaving the physical body. It’s dramatic, it’s fun, it’s a real thing that you can learn to do. But it’s not necessary to do this in order to perceive non-locally and it’s not the method that professionals use almost ever.

This idea is present in various forms in the world’s spiritual traditions: that humans have one or more “energy bodies”, made of some subtle matter not yet scrutable to physical instruments, which is capable under certain conditions of becoming detached from the physical body. This subjective experience is undoubtedly a fundamental part of the human experience, emerging as it does across cultures and occurring spontaneously to individuals who’ve never even heard of it².

Phenomenologically, all that we can say for certain in terms of ESP is that it is possible for humans (and animals) to be aware of information non-locally. There are countless theories of the mechanics behind this, often involving the word “quantum” and a lot of hand waving, energy bodies, spirit guides, precognition - you name it and there’s a theory. The trouble is that none of these theories make novel testable predictions. ESP is an incredibly difficult thing to study, both in practical terms and philosophical: it is very difficult to design experiments to validate subjective experiences as accurately describing the mechanics of existence when the only way of measuring these phenomena is via… subjective experience.

Anyway, we do not need to go to all this trouble of leaving our body in order to perceive non-locally. Which leads nicely onto the next remote viewing myth…

Meditation & Trance #

If reading The Secret of Secrets has you curious about non-local perception then you might be relieved to hear that testing this for yourself does not require either meditation, trance or any other altered states of consciousness.

If you’ve ever vegged out in front of the TV, you’d have entered a so called alpha brainwave state. Basically, you’re relaxed. There are other brainwave states which are relevant to ESP, in fact all of them, but you don’t need to be in some rarefied or weird state in order to get started.

Nevertheless there is some truth here, but to say we must meditate and enter trance is over-simplifying it.

A daily meditation practice will train your mind. It is likely to improve all aspects of your life through greater relaxation and mental clarity. It will also improve your ability to perceive non-locally. Eating healthily and getting enough sleep will also improve your ability to perceive non-locally, but some incredible feats of psychic perception have been performed under the influence of alcohol and drugs, and by non-meditators. The lesson here is not to let perfect get in the way of good. We’re never done learning, there’s always some way we can improve, but the important thing is just to get started.

Altered States and Trances #

Remote viewing absolutely can be done in a trance state. In fact, early phases of the US military research on remote viewing were done this way. A “mind awake, body asleep” state of very deep relaxation helps reduce mental noise, and can dramatically improve the “bandwidth”, particularly for visual perception. If clear visuals are what you’re after, this approach useful.

In practice, really great visuals seem appealing but are often not operationally useful. In terms of problem solving, usually we want an answer to a question or a description of something. Strong visual perceptions are useful for ‘who’ and ‘where’ questions, but much less so for ‘why’ and ‘how’.

The trance approach also has its downsides. Being nearly asleep means first of all you can’t take notes, and secondly that your executive function is also half asleep. So if you need to explore the information at your target in detail, it’s harder to do because you can’t think as acutely as when in a more awake state.

The US military solved this problem by using a so called “monitor”, a person who would guide the viewer in a non-leading way. The monitor must also be blind to the target to prevent them accidentally transferring their ideas or bias to the viewer, but even then it’s tricky.

In the modern world of civilian remote viewing, most practitioners don’t have the luxury of the time or quiet to enter a deep trance, nor another trained person on hand to monitor them. Most remote viewers work in a relaxed awake state, taking notes and sketching on paper or a tablet. We sometimes do use trance states, but they’re not where we start.

“Stargate tried to develop a never-before-imagined surveillance technique called ‘remote viewing’” #

Star Gate (that’s two words) was the last in a series of super secret codenames for the part of the US military’s psychic spying program which has been declassified³.

“The CIA did work in non-local consciousness?” #

I’m sure they did/do, however the declassified part of the US military’s psychic spying programme was based in the army. It was the DIA, not the CIA. The CIA ended up with custody of the project right at the end, decided to end it for reasons other than it’s well demonstrated efficacy, and commissioned a report after the fact to justify this decision by pretending remote viewing didn’t work.

Of the things the CIA is publicly known to be involved in there’s many crazy things, and you’ll see “CIA remote viewing” and “CIA gateway process” all over youtube thumbnails. The truth is, this time it actually wasn’t them. Perhaps the exception which proves the rule!

What about Noetic Science? #

Brown uses this term somewhat interchangeably with non-local consciousness. Check out this conversation between Dan Brown and Dean Radin of the Institute for Noetic Science!

Dean Radin is a scientist who’s worked tirelessly to investigate psi and bring the topic into broader awareness. His book Real Magic is a good starting point.

Other Perspectives #

If you’d like to learn even more about psi, non-local consciousness and noetic science in Dan Brown’s The Secret of Secrets, please check out these posts by my friends:

• Dan Brown’s The Secret of Secrets and the Wyrd Zeitgeist, Peter Merry
• The Secret of Secrets and Beyond, Larry Burk

This article in video format #

If you have family or friends who’ve read The Secret of Secrets who are curious about the consciousness research presented in the story, please share this video with them so we can bring this fascinating topic to a broader audience.

The above video is really just me saying what’s in this article, but with less information and more pictures.