Frequently Asked Questions

1. How does one decode complex ideograms?

From the SRV vocabulary:

"Ideograms - These are marks that are drawn very quickly by a remote viewer, normally in the beginning of a remote-viewing session. Ideograms often resemble squiggles, sometimes curvy, sometimes straight, and sometimes with angles. The various characteristics of the ideograms tend to reflect aspects of the target for the remote-viewing session. Thus, there are ideograms for the various gestalts, such as mountains, structures, land, air, movement, subjects, water, and so on. Ideograms that reflect more than one gestalt are called 'complex ideograms.'"

Complex ideograms pose a special decoding problem for the remote viewer. The structure of SRV is designed to deal with one target gestalt at a time, so when more than one gestalt is represented in a single ideogram, special procedures are required to deal with the situation. There are three commonly employed solutions to this. Which solution is adopted depends on the needs of the session data, the SRV procedures being used (Basic, Enhanced, Advanced, etc.), and the level of training of the remote viewer.

Some viewers may be tempted to lump together all of the descriptors for a complex ideogram. Thus, the data for "C" in Phase 1 would contain a hodgepodge of descriptive words all mixed up in a "soup" of data. However, it is important to remember that the purpose of doing a remote-viewing session is not just to describe a target, but to supply data about a target to an analyst. Thus, skilled remote viewers need to separate the information for the various gestalts so that the analyst can understand clearly which descriptor is associated with each gestalt.

Complex ideogram solutions:

a) The easiest (and sometimes the best) way to deal with complex ideograms is to avoid them in the first place. This is done by training the subspace mind to draw simple ideograms that represent only one gestalt at a time. This is normally done by briefly closing one's eyes and silently voicing the desire to have only one gestalt represented at a time in an ideogram. The subspace mind wants to assist with the coordination of the information to the physical conscious mind and normally responds by supplying simple ideograms from then onward.

If complex ideograms occur nonetheless, then the remote viewer does one of the following:

b) The viewer places a circled "1," "2," "3," etc. next to each distinct element in a complex ideogram. For example, if a complex ideogram with structure and subject gestalts has a vertical line, an angle, and a straight horizontal line that is (at the end of the horizontal line) combined with a single-looped squiggle, then the viewer would place circled "1" next t the perpendicular lines (that is, the vertical line, the angle, and the horizontal line) and a "2" next to the curving squiggle. In Basic SRV and Enhanced SRV, the viewer then decodes each of these ideogram elements separately, and one at a time. This is accomplished by writing an "A1," "B1," "C1," and "D1" for the first ideogram elelment, followed by a similar collection of data ("A2," "B2," etc.) for the second ideogram element. To avoid gestalt confusion, the viewer must be sure to probe only one ideogram element at a time when collecting data for that element. This normally results in as many pages of data as there are ideogram elements. Thus, a single ideogram with, say, two elements would produce two pages of data, one for the first ideogram element and the second for the other element.

c) The viewer can choose to ignore all but one element in a complex ideogram. If this is done, the viewer should probe and decode only the one ideogram element. The viewer must indicate which ideogram element is being decoded by circling the part of the ideogram that is relevant for the data collected. This procedure is acceptible when multiple ideograms are being drawn for a target. In general, when an ideogram element is correctly decoded, it is often omitted from future ideograms. If a later ideogram is also complex, then the remote viewer can probe the repeating element in the new ideogram to see if the decoding has changed. If the decoding has not changed, then the viewer should focus on decoding one of the as-yet-undecoded elements of the new ideogram, thereby ignoring the elements of the new ideogram that have been decoded previously.