If you’ve been remote viewing for a good amount of years you’ve accumulated boxed archives with many thousands of sheets of paper. I know I have. Plain ole 8-1/2″ x 11″ white stock paper and a good pen were a remote viewers standard issue tools for decades. The ole adage was “pen on paper, go!”. Times have changed. While nothing will arguably ever completely replace the tactile feel and response of “pen on paper”, and that’s absolutely fine, current technology has gotten so good that the advantages of devices such as tablets and digital white boards far outweigh the few shortcomings – in my opinion.

I currently use the application GoodNotes on an iPad tablet for most remote viewing activity and have for quite some time now. Modern tablets and pen technology has improved so much the last several years that kinesthetic nuances like subtle changes in pen stroke and tilt pressure sensitivity are now in line with a “traditional” pen. Accessories like a decent matte style screen cover adequately replicate the friction and drag of paper while also providing adequate probing feel from my experience. Is it a perfect pen and paper alternative, subjectively maybe not, but I compare it to the modern dichotomy between acoustics drums and electronic drums. Electronic drums will never 100% replace every aspect of the feel and sound of acoustics drums, however at this stage they do in 99.3% of scenarios – again, just my opinion. The advantages far outweigh the few current shortcomings.

Using GoodNotes for remote viewing, gone are the days of scanning and/or faxing 50 pages of a remote viewing session. I no longer have to keep buying reems of paper; I don’t have to keep creating new box archives. GoodNotes provides the ability to easily export a session to PDF format for sharing; I can annotate which is awesome for training and learning environments and I can easily save work to iCloud or other connected services – or not. GoodNotes allows me to organize remote viewing sessions work in to folders, notebooks or how ever I choose. It also allows various templates and paper styles. Oh, and did I mention it’s inexpensive – $8 inexpensive. I’d spend several times that amount each month on cases of paper so in reality you’re going to save money, and trees! Yes, there are “free” alternatives, however the long standing feature set, stability and active develop of Goodnotes is worth the $8. I’m a long standing open source advocate, however I’ll be the first to acknowledge that free does not necessarily equate to quality and/or secure reliability.

Below is a pic of my iPad and GoodNotes page doing some ideogram drills as an example (PDF export also included). Oh, for the remote viewers out there, yes you’ll notice some ideograms that resemble numbers. As demonstrated many years ago with successful lottery winnings, I submit to you that even though numbers/digits are a human construct, they are also ideogramic by nature and the mind can be trained to perceive these directly. But that is another story…

Ideogram PDF