So there’s acute medicine, but the chronic conditions that people are heir to have largely disappeared. So the hospitals are much smaller. Most care is given on an outpatient basis. There is much more emphasis on preventive and maintenance care than on post-illness care. And people don’t stay in hospitals for long periods of time. And they’re not cold, sterile places; they’re nurturing places. But there is this mix of biological, organic medicine, genetic engineering, and mechanical technologies. So it looks very different. And there are lots of little clinics.

They describe a kind of extended village life. The communities sound to me like they are in the 5000-10,000 people range, towns.

REDWOOD: Did the 2050 viewers say much about the economic arrangements in this decentralized setup?

SCHWARTZ: People get together who are interested in the same thing in a town, and they work as a group to produce something.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. As I look at the outsourcing that is going on, where jobs are going overseas, what I think the 2050s are talking about is that people develop skill sets and they market them all over the world because of the information revolution. So it’s a kind of re-tribalization and guilding. It produces a very different social order.

It is not a bleak vision of the future. When you see movies about the future, like The Matrix, it’s always so mechanistic, cold and machiny and inorganic and deadly. I don’t get any of that. Housing is much more energy conserving. I’m just posting an article on the Schwartzreport today about materials we can make buildings out of that will suck pollutants out of the air. So this has already begun. The 2050s are describing constructions that are much more energy efficient, with much better insulation, more organic. They are scaled to people size. And you don’t live in a place where you don’t know your neighbors. People are much more engaged in the community. So it’s not a bad world.

REDWOOD: Did these future viewers talk at all about diet and what we will be eating?

SCHWARTZ: In a way. They talk about communal growing of foods. Also, sanitation is handled differently. They describe something like what is done now in Davis, California where sewage is purified by plants, with pools of organisms that eat the stuff, and out flows fresh water. But not all of them. There are also these militaristic communities where people are very rigid about everything. It all depends on the people.

REDWOOD: You are hosting a conference this fall in Virginia Beach. Tell us about it.

SCHWARTZ: Eight years ago I started the Schwartzreport, which is a daily web publication that focuses on the trends that will affect your future. So it’s not news in the sense that most people think of as news. I don’t do polemics, politically partisan ideological pieces. I do developments that I think are creating trends. In 2001, when I moved to Virginia Beach, I began a conference to focus on one topic area of trends that would affect our future. We’ve done 21st Century Medicine, The History of Remote Viewing, The Physics of Consciousness, and this year on November 3-6, we’re going to do the second part of Remote Viewing. The ‘How to” part. It will be an intensive seminar designed to teach you the techniques that enable you to open to the possibilities of nonlocal awareness. Several of the seminar sessions are experiential so that you directly come to know that aspect of yourself which exists outside of time-space. I suppose I should mention that the protocols taught in this seminar are completely neutral in any religious sense. [For information, call (757) 428-3588 or visit www.schwartzreportconference.com]

REDWOOD: What is the subject of the current book you’re now completing?

SCHWARTZ: I’ve just finished Remote Viewing: The Mental Martial Art, which is everything I know about how you open yourself and allow nonlocal awareness to emerge in your consciousness. The book will be out in the fall of 2005. It’s hard to talk about these sorts of things. The words are hard, you get trapped in the words, because they’re all time and space words. Part of the problem in writing this book was to think about how to conceptualize it so that you could get people to see a way through to how to think about it. Anyway, I have put together everything I know about this subject, and how you can do it.

REDWOOD: Is there anything else to which you can compare Remote Viewing?

SCHWARTZ: The “aha! moment” of genius (when people have breakthroughs), the epiphany of the religious ecstatic, and the experience of the remote viewer describing the place, all appear to be three different forms of contact with nonlocal consciousness, modulated by expectation and intention. By which I mean, the religious ecstatic seeks to see God, and so that’s what the experience comes as. The scientist trying to find a fundamental principle is seeking an insight that will give him an understanding of how the world works. The remote viewer just wants to describe something.

One of the nice things about remote viewing is that it allows you to have an experience of nonlocal awareness that does not disorient you. I hadn’t really realized that until I wrote this book. You know, if I ask you to describe a commonplace object like scissors or a thimble, you have to use nonlocal awareness to do that, but the object is commonplace and ordinary, so it’s not threatening. Whereas, if you have an experience that filters through as God talking to you, it’s extremely disorienting. And so with remote viewing, because it doesn’t have all of that affect, we can study how it works without having to get so involved in the context in which it occurs.

It’s very hard to talk to a religious ecstatic about the physiological dynamics of their experience. They don’t care about that kind of thing. “I’ve talked to God! Who cares?” Geniuses are better, and often do describe the process. But they too, are focused less on that aspect than on what they have seen. Remote Viewing research, because of the relative mundaneness of its targets, allows the process to be studied. And what all of this suggests is that we are all linked in a vast network of life, from the smallest cell to the highest and most powerful person. We are all not only linked but interdependent. That the well being of the one affects the well being of the many, and that as we seek to that which is life affirming, we evoke the best that is within us.

Daniel Redwood, a writer for the past 25 years, practices chiropractic and acupuncture in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Dr. Redwood is the author of the textbook Fundamentals of Chiropractic (Mosby, 2003), and Associate Editor of The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. A collection of his writing is available at www.drredwood.com. He can be reached by email at danredwood@aol.com.

©2005 Daniel Redwood