The Power of Eight groups could also create a psychic internet, which I first discovered during an intention for John, who had been the victim of a serious motorcycle accident. His mother attended one of our workshops shortly after the accident and reported that he had sustained a serious injury to his neck and several vertebrae of his spine. Doctors had told his mother that the injury to his spinal cord was so severe that he might even be left a quadriplegic.
That weekend John’s mother asked her Power of Eight group to send a special intention to her son. Two months later she wrote me with a progress report: after our intention and follow-up intentions by his family members, her son began to move his upper body and had even been able to move his toes.
“He is experiencing an amazing recovery. He is probably about 85 percent back to normal—which doctors thought would take him six months to a year—not six weeks!”
If John’s remarkable progress had anything to do with the Power of Eight group, they’d achieved it without any link to him: no live connection or photo of him, no knowledge of him or his whereabouts, no connection with him whatsoever except his mother and her thoughts about him.
I began to consider that a group “prayer” circle could create an enhanced healing environment, and the group has the ability to make some sort of invisible connection, the same sort of extraordinary connection we’d been witnessing with the global Intention Experiments.
I decided to explore that connection in our global experiments on something besides plants and seeds, and to work with another scientist in order to demonstrate that the results we’d achieved in the leaf and seed experiments weren’t an artifact produced by a single lab. I approached a Russian physicist named Konstantin Korotkov, a professor at what is now called ITMO University (the Russian National University of Informational Technology, Mechanics and Optics, formerly St. Petersburg State University). Korotkov had advanced on Popp’s ideas and equipment after working out that he could measure this faint light far more easily when he ran an electromagnetic field through it, which excited it hundreds of thousands of times and made it far easier to measure.
At the age of twenty-four, Korotkov, already making his name as a well-established quantum physicist, had become intrigued by the work of Semyon Davidovich Kirlian, a Russian engineer who discovered that when anything that conducts energy, including human tissue, is placed on a plate made of an insulating material, such as glass, and exposed to high-voltage, high-frequency electricity, the resulting low current creates a halo of colored light around the object that can be captured on film. Kirlian made big claims for this light, maintaining that his photographs revealed nothing less than the energy field of a living thing, and the state of this field, or aura, as he came to refer to it, mirrored the state of its health.
Eventually Korotkov came up with a means of improving on this rudimentary system and capturing this mysterious light in real time by stirring up the photons of a living system, stimulating them into an excited state so that they would shine millions of times more intensely than usual. He developed a Gas Discharge Visualization (GDV) device, which made use of state-of-the-art optics, digitized television matrices, and a powerful computer, a blend of photography, measurements of light intensity, and computerized pattern recognition. A computer program would then extrapolate from this a real-time image of the “biofield” surrounding the organism and deduce from it the state of the organism’s health.
When we first made contact, Korotkov was fifty-five and a well-known public figure who had lent an air of legitimacy to Kirlian photography and the concept of human energy fields. He’d written five books on the subject, attracting the attention of the Russian Ministry of Health, which recognized the importance of his invention in assessing health and diagnosing illness. By 2007, the GDV device was widely used as a general diagnosis tool and as a means to evaluate a patient’s progress after surgery, and the Russian Ministry of Sport had begun to take notice of Korotkov and his machinery, even using it to assess the state of athletes training for the Olympics. Outside Russia, thousands of medical practitioners were using his machines, a fact not overlooked by America’s National Institutes of Health; indeed, a portion of Gary Schwartz’s grant was to be used to investigate the “biofield” using Korotkov’s equipment.
Korotkov is an interesting paradox: a lithe, compact figure with a shaved head who is taciturn and methodical about his work but effusive in his private life. Although humble about his celebrated inventions, he is drawn to the grand gesture, once arriving at a formal event in Japan dressed in traditional Japanese kimono, brandishing a samurai sword. While Korotkov enjoys the notoriety he has achieved with these practical applications, his own private passion is the effect of human consciousness on the physical world, and he is infused with a strong sense of spirituality, which developed after a number of astonishing findings discovered in the course of his work. Although raised an atheist in keeping with the culture of Cold War Soviet Russia in the 1950s and 1960s, he was drawn increasingly to the larger questions of consciousness, particularly the question of how long this mysterious light lingers with the body after death.
In a series of experiments carried out in the late nineties, Korotkov and a team of assistants had taken readings of dozens of newly dead men and women, and found that for many hours, there was no principal difference between the gas discharge glow of live people and the cadavers. Furthermore, the pattern of the light over time followed distinctly different patterns, which seemed to mirror the nature of their deaths; when people died gently, so did their light, but when they died more violently, their light had more abrupt transitions. Those who died a natural death had larger oscillations during the first fifty-five hours after death, which afterward receded to gentler waves.
Although materialists would argue that the light was simply the residual physiological activity of muscular tissues transforming in the process of decomposition, the forensic medical literature made it clear that any electrophysiological characteristics of a newly dead body abruptly changed in the first few hours and either remained constant or created smooth curves. Korotkov’s data did not resemble that at all. The only conclusion was that this light carried on after life had ended, evidence of some sort of transition. Korotkov wrote a book about his discoveries and privately became intensely spiritual, regarding this “energy-informational structure” as analogous to what is often referred to as the soul, connected to but ultimately independent of the human body. While carrying on his work for the various Russian ministries, increasingly he was drawn to examining the nature of consciousness, specifically the effect of our thoughts on others.
When I first approached Korotkov to work with me, we decided that our first experiment would be rudimentary: attempting to affect water with our thoughts in some subtle way. One of the subtlest of changes, he suggested, would be to measure any changes in the configuration of water molecules, which we now know have the peculiar ability to act as a team. Two Italian physicists at the Milan Institute for Nuclear Physics, the late Giuliano Preparata and his colleague, the late Emilio Del Giudice, had demonstrated that water has an amazing property: when closely packed together, molecules of water exhibit a collective behavior, forming what they have termed “coherent domains,” like a powerful laser light. These clusters of water molecules tend to become “informed” in the presence of other molecules, polarizing around any charged molecule, storing and carrying its frequency so that it may be read at a distance.
In a sense water is like a tape recorder, imprinting and carrying information whether or not the original molecule is still there. As Russian scientists have observed, water has the capacity to retain a memory of applied electromagnetic fields for hours, even days, and other Italian scientists, from Sapienza University of Rome and the Second University of Naples, and more recently, Luc Montagnier, the Nobel laureate and codiscoverer of HIV, have confirmed Preparata and Del Giudice’s findings: certain electronic resonance signals create permanent changes in the various properties of water. The Roman and Neapolitan team also confirmed that water molecules organize themselves to form a pattern on which wave information can be imprinted. Water appears both to send the signal and also to amplify it.
As with plants, animals, and people, liquids like water “glow.” The GDV machine is sensitive enough to measure various energy dynamics of water, and can detect any change in the emission of light on the surface of the liquid, which in turn depends upon how the water molecules are clustered together. Numerous experiments conducted by Korotkov’s team on a large variety of biological liquids demonstrate that GDV equipment is highly sensitive to changes in the chemical and physical contents of liquids, which don’t show up in ordinary chemical analyses. His equipment has been able to distinguish the infinitesimal differences, for instance, between blood samples of healthy people and those patients suffering from illness, between natural and synthetic essential oils with the same chemical composition, and even between ordinary water and that which has had highly diluted homeopathic remedies added to it.
For our first experiment, Konstantin would fill a test tube to the top with distilled water and insert an electrode connected to standard GDV equipment. The plan was to measure and compare the signals being emitted from the water before, during, and after the experiment. We would ask my internet audience from my Intention Experiment website, e-newsletter, and social media pages to send love to a photo of this sample of water, an attempt to prove the claims of the late Japanese naturopath Dr. Masaru Emoto that emotion can change the structure of water.
Dr. Emoto had become well-known for a series of informal experiments, published in The Hidden Messages in Water and other books, suggesting that our thoughts get embedded in water. He’d asked volunteers to send positive or negative thoughts to water, then froze the water and photographed the ice crystals. Those crystals sent positive intention resulted in beautiful symmetrical shapes, claimed Emoto, whereas those samples exposed to negative intention—fear, hate, anger—formed muddy, asymmetrical crystals. As outrageous as his work seemed, it had been successfully replicated twice by the noted parapsychologist Dr. Dean Radin, chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences at Petaluma, California.
Still a bit stung by some of our initial technological failures with the leaf experiments, I deliberately limited advertising of the upcoming experiments to our own e-community, so as not to overwhelm the Ning system. Even without much promotion, thousands of people signed up for this next experiment from eighty countries around the globe, including a large showing from every continent other than Antarctica, and from other far-flung places: Indonesia, Zambia, Costa Rica, China. Word about the experiments had got out—even to Emoto himself, who sent me an email wishing us good luck.
In the evening of the appointed day, Konstantin sent us a photo of the experimental test tube, which we posted on our website but was visible only to those who had registered for the experiment, then turned on his GDV instruments and a CD of Rachmaninoff to keep him company, and waited.
Hours later, after the experiment was over, Konstantin reviewed the measurements his equipment had taken and discovered a highly significant change. The light emissions in the water had gained in intensity, and there was also a significant effect in the change in the total area of the light emissions. However, these variations occurred before the actual experiment started, came to a halt six minutes before the planned intention time, and only started up again once we’d finished. When we looked at the comparison between the time of our intention and twenty minutes before that, the significance in the data disappeared.
Perhaps our intention had been too passive or diffuse and might work better if we focused on something more specific, as we had done with the Germination Experiments. After all, the idea of an amorphous emotion like love is highly individual, particularly when it is being sent to a beaker of water. And a number of our participants had managed to get into the site early, which could have skewed the results.
We decided to repeat the experiment on January 22, 2008, but with three important differences: we’d use a very specific intention with our experimental sample, asking our audience to make the water “glow and glow”; we’d set up a control, an identical beaker of water with distilled water from the same source, also attached to the GDV machine; and we’d extend the overall time of taking readings.
This time, we recorded a highly significant statistical difference in the spread of light and its intensity during the intention period and the period afterward, compared with the measurements of the control beaker. Most intriguing, the big change occurred just during the ten-minute window of our intention, compared to before or afterward. Although our participants numbered fewer than the first time around, we’d had a much larger effect. Once again, size of group made no difference to the outcome.
You begin by making certain assumptions, you construct a careful hypothesis, you design a way to test it out, and then you sit back to see where you land, only to find that a few of the confident assumptions you have about the universe have been blown to smithereens.
Of the eleven experiments that we’d been able to run successfully, ten had achieved a successful outcome—all but one of them statistically significant—but in the process, they’d overturned every one of our initial assumptions about how group intention might work.
I tried to unpack what we’d learned about what was happening. We’d been able to change water and plants with our thoughts, whether we were together in a room, all in disparate places, or even thousands of miles away from our target. And our thoughts were affecting things, even though we’d never been sending intention to the thing itself, which of course was sitting in a distant laboratory, but only a symbol of the thing: its photograph.
Although the only point of contact was a photograph on an internet site, my participants readily established a profound connection with one another and with the target. Thinking in a group seemed to create a nonlocal psychic internet of instant connection, where the distance between the participants no longer mattered, even when we weren’t working with real targets and intention—just their photographic representation, in a sense like a voodoo doll.
When we began the global Intention Experiments, Gary and I had operated on the assumption that it was important to have some live connection with our target, which is why we’d first insisted on a webcam display of the actual target in the early studies. But during both the Germination Intention Experiments and Water Experiments we discovered that human consciousness can connect and affect a virtual target and that this connection proves just as potent. As psychics and other clairvoyants have maintained for years, the symbolic representation of something, like a map coordinate, easily enables consciousness to zero in on the target.
The size of the group hadn’t mattered either; a tiny group of a hundred in a room in Rhinebeck a thousand miles away from the target had proved as potent as groups five times that size. The Second Korotkov Water Experiment had fewer attendees participating but a greater effect. Distance from the target didn’t have any bearing on the outcome either. My Australian audience eight thousand miles away from the target in Tucson, Arizona, achieved the same size effect as did a group of intenders located in the neighboring state of California. When sending thoughts to something, bigger or closer wasn’t necessarily better.
Another strange effect was that intention seemed to affect everything in its path; when the seeds were part of an Intention Study, every seed was in some way affected, whether or not it was actually targeted. This also had a big implication, suggesting that living things register information from the entire environment, and not simply between two communicating entities.
What seemed to count most was experience. Our most impressive results came from those who were practiced in sending focused thought, such as experienced meditators or healers. Our most successful Germination Experiments, where the seedlings sent intention in this case grew about twice as high as controls, had involved my audience in Hilton Head, South Carolina, which included five hundred longtime practitioners of Healing Touch. And from both the Germination Experiments and the Water Experiments, we’d also learned that our intention worked better the more specific we’d been.
These first experiments had been rudimentary, even a bit crude, but their implications were enormous. They even challenged certain Newtonian laws that form the backbone of classical physics. Newton described a well-behaved universe of separate objects acting according to fixed laws in time and space, and one of the most fundamental of these is his first law—the idea that any given object remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity unless acted upon by an external force. In that law is embodied the cornerstone of many confident assumptions we make about how the world works, the notion that things are static, separate, and inviolate unless something physical, some force—a push, a punch, a swift kick—is done to them. Indeed, all of Newton’s laws describe things that exist independently of each other and require some physical, measurable energy to change, even to move.
Very little about our experiments reflected anything we could regard as a Newtonian view of the world. We weren’t doing anything to an object; we were thinking to that object. The effects we were recording were more akin to the rogue behavior of quantum physics, as first defined by Niels Bohr, and his protégé, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg. They recognized a few fundamental aspects of the quantum universe. In the world of the tiny, things aren’t actually things yet, but only a tiny cloud of probability, a potential of any one of its future selves—or what is known by physicists as a “superposition,” or sum, of all probabilities.
It is now accepted in the scientific establishment that in the hermetic world of the quantum, physical matter isn’t solid and stable—indeed, isn’t an anything yet, and what dissolves this little cloud of probability into something concrete and measurable is the involvement of an observer. Once these scientists actually observe or measure a subatomic particle, this little cloud of pure potential “collapses” into one particular identifiable state.
The implications of these early experimental findings in quantum physics, what is now termed the Observer Effect, have always been profound: living consciousness somehow is the influence that converts the potential of something into something real. The moment we look at an electron or take a measurement, we help to determine its final state. This has always held a number of uncomfortable implications, the greatest of which is that the most essential ingredient in creating our universe is the consciousness that observes it—in fact, that nothing in the universe exists as an actual “thing” independently of our perception of it.
Scientists have always shied away from that uncomfortable notion and embraced a more palatable, if improbable, world view: that there is one set of laws for the large and visible, and another for the microscopic, and once those anarchic subatomic things somehow begin to recognize they’re part of something big and visible, they start behaving themselves again, according to dependable, logical Newtonian laws.
A few of the assumptions of that confident world view—time and space as inviolate, Newton’s first law, even that idea of there being separate sets of rules for the big, visible world and the unseen particle—had had one tiny hole blown in them by these early experiments.
Both the Power of Eight circles and the global experiments were revealing something more—something central about human consciousness and its ability to trespass over the boundaries of objects and other people, even the borders of space and time. We’d repeatedly demonstrated that the human mind has the ability to operate non-locally, move through walls and over seas and continents, and change matter thousands of miles away. Scientists struggle with the idea, first proposed by German philosopher Immanuel Kant, that the world is not possible without us, but perhaps what is actually meant by the Observer Effect is that we create as we attend to a particular object, focusing on the object in unison and articulating a very specific request together.
Our experiences did not bear out the theories of the TM group that when you are trying for specific outcome through the power of thought, you need a critical mass. A focused and coherent group of one hundred in a single room had the same effect as thousands clustered around the world and connected via the web. We got the same result on the target whether we had an audience occupying the same space or scattered all over the globe but simply joined by the same thought and the same internet page.
In fact, as I was beginning to realize, it also worked with a group of just eight. The intentions worked, I can only guess, because we were all, at that moment, occupying the same psychic space.
The only thing that mattered, the only thing that appeared to be needed, was any sort of group.