Later, doctors would tell Daniel that he was lucky—it could have been his face. There’d been a horrific gas explosion at work, and his hands had been so badly burned that after he’d been rushed to the hospital, doctors told his wife he’d be needing skin grafts and weeks in intensive care. Feeling helpless and in a distraught state, she contacted a little intention group, which she and Daniel had created on my website.
By 2008 after those first expensive leaf and seed experiments, we’d decided to set up any future large-scale experiments on Ning, an online platform enabling people to create custom social networks. Ning offered two things we needed: hundreds of distributed servers, capable of handling unlimited bandwidth and unlimited numbers of participants simultaneously accessing our site, and most important, a free platform. But it also had a community site for our participants to join, where they could create their own small intention circles.
Daniel and a few other community members had created a little group on Ning and been experimenting in sending intention to each other. Hearing of Daniel’s plight, the group now had a real-life target. They began sending him a daily intention at set times every day.
Five days later, Daniel left the hospital. He’d begun to heal weeks earlier than normal and confounded all expectations by not needing skin grafts. His doctors wanted to study him as a medical miracle. By way of comparison, an associate of Daniel’s who had sustained near-identical injuries had stuck to orthodox healing methods. He remained in intensive care for another two weeks and went on to get skin grafts.
I was in front of an audience in Dallas in April 2008, elaborating on charts and graphs on a PowerPoint screen about our Intention Experiment results when Daniel raised his hand, still covered in what appeared to be a gauzy glove, to tell me his story.
“Since there were two of us with near-identical injuries, you can consider my experience as a controlled experiment,” he said with a laugh.
I returned to my seeds and leaves and graphs, but I’d been blindsided. The rational part of me knew that we couldn’t really compare Daniel and his buddy unless we controlled for all sorts of biological variables, but suppose he was right? Was it just the power of Daniel’s belief—his expectation of healing—or was there amplified power in a group whose members were not in the same place but sending intention virtually?
Fact: Daniel and his colleague sustained similar injuries.
Fact: Daniel was the only one who’d had the group healing intention.
Fact: Daniel alone defied all prognoses and became, as his doctors were calling it, a “medical miracle.”
With a miracle, you don’t try to understand it by starting at the beginning, you start at the end with the bald fact of it, like walking into a room and discovering a dead body. You try to work your way back to the point where it veered off the path of known possibility, like a detective looking for the few telling fibers of cloth left on the sofa, any slight clue to deduce a credible cause.
You can’t isolate the single agent of change; you can only try to create a favorable environment to coax it into reappearing. I got home and over that summer decided to play around a bit more with groups. The experiences of Daniel’s and Don Berry’s spinal improvements had sparked an idea. Perhaps we could run regular group intentions for people like Daniel and Don—which we would call our Intention of the Week. We could treat this as one more kind of informal experiment—a larger version of the Power of Eight groups that I was running in my workshops.
I invited my email community to participate in a weekly intention from our website—usually to try to heal someone with a health challenge or ease someone’s financial difficulties in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis that autumn. We invited the web community to nominate an intention of the week, and we posted the person’s name, condition, and photo on our website to send healing intention every Sunday at 1 p.m. eastern standard time.
Before long I was receiving dozens of requests every week: people with cancer or traumatic injury; children with brain damage or birth defects; members with impending bankruptcies or job losses; estranged families and wounded pets. The website was turning into the cyber equivalent of a weekly prayer group.
Our intentions didn’t always work. We attracted many requests from patients who were weeks away from death. And it didn’t always work in the Power of Eight groups I set up in the workshops. In most cases, we had no reports by doctors or other health professionals to independently verify the effects claimed by family members of our target intendee. Sometimes the effects were enormous—two readers claimed to have had spontaneous remissions of their cancer—and other times fleeting, but there were enough testimonials of extraordinary improvement for me to think that something was going on.
Brian had been left paralyzed and was still unconscious from a recent major accident, and his family sent in a request for him to be one of our targets. Right after Brian’s healing intention, his mother started noticing that he was becoming more aware of his surroundings and paying closer attention with an overall increase in consciousness. He began answering questions more often than he had before and even began to initiate conversation.
Two days after the intention for him, Brian went to physical therapy, and for the first time walked sixty feet with the therapist and his walker and then another forty feet without a brace on the right leg. He also began using his right arm more, and was able to start riding a recumbent bike in therapy. He’d regained movement months earlier than his doctors had predicted. Margaret, a family friend, who’d nominated Brian as an Intention of the Week, wrote in with a progress report. Brian’s family was “amazed with the increase in his progress,” she said. To their mind, the group intention had triggered some form of “divine intervention.”
Miracle. Amazement. Divine. Against all expectations.
The more I heard words like these and stories like Brian’s, the more unsettled I became and the more tightly controlled I sought to make the large-scale global experiments I continued to run in tandem throughout 2007 and 2008. Gary and I decided to return to seeds, but this time with some application to real life: we’d try to affect their growth rate and health. We settled on barley seeds because they are both a common grain fed to livestock and a healthful grain for humans. We would be asking a question with huge practical implications: Can food grow faster and be healthier when sent good thoughts?
And this time, a few scientists had navigated a path of sorts before us, with several similar studies showing that seeds sent intention by a healer or irrigated with water held by the healer were healthier and had a faster germination rate and growth. These small studies were intriguing, but all had involved single individuals sending intention to seeds right in front of them. With this experiment we would be investigating whether we could attain the same outcome—or even a greater effect on our targets—if there were an entire group of disparate intenders and they were sending their thoughts from thousands of miles away.
For each of these experiments, Gary and his lab team prepared four trays of thirty barley seeds apiece—one target and three controls—to eliminate chance findings. This time, the best we could offer our audience, to connect with the target, was a photograph, although we were far from sure it was going to work. Mark decided that he would simply photograph the four sets of seeds with an ordinary camera and send them to me the night before the experiment.
I had plans to lecture in different parts of the world during that time, which gave us an ideal opportunity to test whether the experiment would work in many situations and without the worries of whether our website would hold up. My first port of call was Australia, a four-hour talk in front of seven hundred people at a very slick conference whose organizers had flown me there first-class and sent around my photo to the entire hotel staff so I’d be given star treatment.
The night before the first experiment, Mark sent me photographs of four batches of thirty seeds, each sitting in a little half circle in a seedling tray labeled A, B, C, or D, and I incorporated each image on a slide in my PowerPoint. During my live lecture the following day I had a member of the audience choose our target among the four sets of seeds, then I simply projected the photograph of the targeted seeds while leading the audience in the intention for the seeds to enjoy enhanced growth and health, again playing “Choku Rei,” which I’ve played for every experiment, since the very first one at that 2007 London conference, in order to maintain consistency.
Once we’d finished, I called Mark to tell him we were done—the signal for him to plant all four trays of seeds. At the end of five days, he harvested the seedlings and measured their lengths in millimeters. I then had to patiently wait for weeks while Gary did his calculations, which had to be squeezed in between his own frantic teaching and writing schedule.
Gary had labeled this and the subsequent trials like this the “Intention Studies,” but in order to eliminate the possibility that our results were a chance finding, or down to something other than our audience’s intention, he also ran a completely separate series of control experiments after each Intention Experiment. Scientists often conduct control experiments that mimic the actual experiment in every regard without using any sort of changing agent in order to eliminate the possibility that any change observed in the actual experiment is caused by something other than the agent itself. With these control experiments, Mark set up the experiment in an identical fashion to the regular Intention Studies, selecting and preparing another 120 seeds into four sets and randomly choosing one set as the “intention target,” but this time, there would be no actual intenders and no actual intention sent to the target. After a set period of time, as with the genuine experiments, he would plant all four sets of seeds, then harvest and measure them after five days.
If these control experiments showed little or no difference in the seed growth, compared to our actual Intention Studies, this would confirm that intention had been the only cause of the change. This experiment was to act as a second-tier control. It would also give us double the number of seeds to compare—1,440 in total—which also offered the possibility of greater statistical significance.
In the summer of 2007, we ran two more barley seed experiments—one with a small internet audience, and another one in front of my audience of about a hundred at Omega Institute, a retreat center in Rhinebeck, New York, offering courses in human potential.
After the Rhinebeck experiment, Gary analyzed the three studies. The results were intriguing. The first and second experiment had significant results, but the third experiment was off the charts. He sent me a first graph, to show the difference between the seeds sent intentions and the controls, a difference of 4 millimeters (0.15 inch), which sounds small but is large enough to be considered significant in a scientific study. He signed off with, “Exciting, yes?”
The third run with our Rhinebeck group with the smallest audience had produced the biggest results. It seemed logical that the bigger the group, the larger the effect, but apparently we didn’t need a certain critical mass to affect our target. Were the specific growth instructions responsible, or was it the experience of the audience, most of whom were highly motivated and seasoned meditators, or even the retreat setting, with its possibility of a greater degree of focus than what’s afforded when taking time out to send intentions during ordinary life?
As any scientist will tell you, a single experimental result is meaningless. The outcome can be pure coincidence—an artifact, as scientists call it. It’s only when your study is replicated many times that you can say with any certainty that you’ve found a true effect. The only thing for us to do was to repeat the experiment a few times more in order to demonstrate that we were onto something real.
We carried out three more Germination Experiments: in Hilton Head, South Carolina, in front of 500 Healing Touch healers; before a workshop of 130 at an Association for Global New Thought conference in Palm Springs, California; and at a retreat workshop at the Crossings in Austin, Texas, with 120 attendees. After we’d run the sixth experiment, Gary analyzed the results formally through a number of complex analyses, comparing the growth of the targeted seeds with the non-targeted seeds in our Intention Studies; all genuine targets with control study “targets”; and the growth of all the seeds in the Intention Studies against the growth of all the seeds in the control studies. He used two types of statistics largely to compensate for the fact that some seeds didn’t sprout at all and others grew wildly longer than usual.
“In a word, the results are STUNNING,” Gary wrote me on March 16.
As an overall average, the seeds sent intention grew significantly higher than the controls in the Intention Studies: 2.20 inches versus 1.89 inches (56 mm versus 48 mm). In the control studies, there was no difference between target seeds and non-targeted seeds; in fact, the seeds labeled “Intention seeds” in the control studies grew 1.79 inches (45mm)—0.07 inches (2 mm) shorter than the non-targeted seeds, and higher than all four sets of seeds in each control study. Our effect in the Intention Studies was statistically significant; there was only a 0.7 percent possibility that we arrived at this result by simple chance.
To get a sense of how meaningful this result was, imagine that you’re playing a game with a coin and you’re trying to achieve a certain number of heads in a row. With our experiment, you’d have to toss that coin 143 times to reach the same result just by chance. Those targeted during real Intention Studies grew significantly higher than those “targeted” in the control studies, with 0.3 percent possibility that this was due to chance—like a coin tossed 333 times.
But the largest effect of all resulted when comparing the results of all plant growth in the actual Intention Experiments against all plant growth in the control experiments. On the days we sent intention, all the plants in the Intention Studies grew higher than had all the plants in the control experiments, with the plants sent intention the highest of all, as though there were some sort of communication between all the seeds in the Intention Studies. This effect was mind-boggling—a 10 million to one possibility that we’d arrived here by simple chance.
What did that mean? Does intention have a “scattergun effect”? Are living things affected by the energy of human thought from the entire environment, and not simply between two communicating entities? I thought of an experiment by Dutch psychologist Eduard Van Wijk, who had carried out numerous studies on the mysterious light emissions discovered by Fritz Popp. Van Wijk had placed a jar of simple algae near a healer and his patient, then measured the photon emissions of the algae during healing sessions and periods of rest. After analyzing the data, he discovered remarkable alterations in the photon count of the algae. The quality and rhythms of emissions significantly changed during the healing sessions, as though the algae were also affected by the healing intention.
Gary wrote up the results of all our barley-seed experiments, then presented them at the Society for Scientific Exploration’s annual meeting in June 2008, and published the summary in the meeting’s proceedings. It was the Intention Experiment’s first attempt at formally establishing the validity of our data, and our conclusion was unequivocal: “Group intention can have selective effects on increasing the growth of seeds.”
I quietly wrestled with the implications of this perfect little experiment. Within the neutral, guarded language of our modest paper lay some profound discoveries about the nature of consciousness. We’d repeatedly demonstrated that the human mind has the ability to move beyond time and space, connect with other minds, and act on matter at a distance. Essentially, we’d demonstrated something extraordinary and profound: that human minds have the capacity to operate non-locally.
Non-locality, also referred to, rather poetically, as “entanglement,” is a strange feature of quantum particles. Once subatomic particles such as electrons or photons are in contact, they are forever influenced by each other for no apparent reason, over any time or any distance, despite the absence of physical force like a push or a kick—all the usual things that physicists understand are necessary for one thing to affect something else.
When particles are entangled, the actions of one will always influence the other, no matter how far they are separated. Once they have connected, the measurement of one subatomic particle instantaneously affects the position of the second one. The two subatomic parties continue to talk to each other, and whatever happens to one is identical to, or the opposite of, what happens to the other.
Although modern physicists readily accept that non-locality is a given feature of the quantum world, they maintain that this strange, counterintuitive property of the subatomic universe does not apply to anything bigger than an electron. Once things get to the sticks-and-stones levels of the world we live in, they claim, the universe starts behaving itself again, according to predictable, measurable, Newtonian laws. A few studies with crystals and algae have hinted at the fact that non-locality exists in the big measurable world and may even be the driving principle behind photosynthesis, but this property is still regarded as the exclusive domain of the tiny, the “spooky action at a distance,” as Albert Einstein so famously put it, of the quantum world, and certainly not the domain of human consciousness.
Nevertheless, our little seed experiment had showed that we could create non-locality out in the big visible world, not only between the minds of individuals but also with a remote target. A group of people in Sydney, Australia, had affected seeds sitting at the University of Arizona’s labs in Tucson eight thousand miles away, just through the power of one focused thought. And our intenders didn’t even have to be in the same location; a group of people scattered around the globe produced the same effect as a group clustered in the same room. Somehow, like a pair of entangled electrons, our individual minds, all at a distance from one another, had made an invisible connection that was able to act collectively to alter a set of seeds, also at a distance.
I began to ponder the possibility that human consciousness possesses the ability to create a sort of psychic internet, allowing us to be in touch with everything at every moment. All we might require is focused attention to log on to it.