By the summer of 2008 I was thoroughly fed up with seeds, leaves, and baby steps in my global experiments and ready to take a giant leap. If a small group praying together in one unified, passionate, single voice created some sort of virtuous entity, how far could we take this healing force on a major scale? I was inspired by my friend Barbara Fields, director of the Association for Global New Thought, who had set up the Peace Project, encouraging peace groups to form in different cities, and also by plans to mark the International Day of Peace on September 2008. I called Gary Schwartz and argued that it was time for us to test whether this group mind we were measuring in the global experiments had the power to heal some major issue in the real world. Let’s do something huge, I said. Let’s see if we can lower violence and restore peace in a war zone. After all, the Transcendental Meditation people have conducted more than five hundred studies examining whether groups of meditators can have an effect in lowering conflict, which have produced some intriguing results.
“If you are trying to affect something this big, you can’t just send a ten-minute intention once and expect it to work,” said Gary. So how to proceed? Like any good scientist, Gary’s impulse is always to begin by replicating whatever study design had worked in this area before. You should build on the work of the TM organization, he said. One study of twenty-four cities demonstrated that when 1 percent of the population was regularly meditating, the crime rate dropped by nearly a quarter. When the TM organization rolled out the study to another forty-eight cities, they had similar results. They’d also been able to show that when a critical mass of advanced TM meditators targeted their meditation to Washington, DC, in 1993 during an upsurge in violent crime, the crime rate fell.
The organization had even experimented with attempts to lower conflict in the Middle East in 1983, and discovered that the higher the number of people meditating on the conflict between Arabs and Israelis in Palestine, the lower the number of fatalities and all violence in both Israel and neighboring Lebanon.
Over the years, the organization has been dogged by rumors of data fixing, but their research appeared to be thorough and well controlled, taking into account many factors, from weather and the seasons to law-enforcement efforts. We could learn plenty from them. The studies had all been published in peer-reviewed journals and so had been subjected to independent scientific scrutiny. But of course, most of the work concerned the effect of a mass passive activity like meditation, which simply strives for peace within the individual. I wanted to take this a stage further, to see what would happen if a large group of individuals were all deliberately willing the death and injury rate to go down.
It so happened that Gary was familiar with the protocol of study design used by the TM organization, which he believed would provide our Peace Intention Experiment with a crude initial blueprint. Some of the studies had examined the effect of the square root of 1 percent of the world’s population, the TM group’s idea of the smallest critical mass necessary to effect change, which amounted to seven thousand meditators located in the same place and carrying out daily meditations for a certain set period of time, just as our earlier experiments had done. It made sense to continue the ten-minute window of intention we had established. “The TM studies ran for a minimum of eight days,” he told me. “You should do the same.”
Before speaking with Gary, I’d written to a contact at the TM organization, who’d been involved with many of their studies, for some friendly informal advice. “The first challenge with this kind of research is finding data sources,” he wrote back in early July. “Good daily data on interpretable measures is hard to come by. Most government statistics are monthly at best, and way out of date,” he said. “But there are some people doing content analysis of conflict, and maybe you can get their databases.” He provided the names of a few possible contacts.
By then I’d assembled my dream team of informal “wise elders,” as I referred to them: Gary Schwartz; Jessica Utts, a professor of statistics at the University of California at Irvine; Dr. Roger Nelson, formerly of Princeton University and now director of the Global Consciousness Project; and Princeton’s Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne, of the PEAR project.
In order to show whether an effect is higher or lower than predicted, statisticians often use a trend-analysis plot, a technique in statistics that attempts to show an underlying pattern in behavior, or a departure from that pattern, over a specific time frame. Jessica Utts, an expert in statistical analyses of consciousness research, planned to model a prediction of the likely average violence levels we could expect in the months after our intention, if the fighting carried on just as it had done in the previous two years. If there was a large difference, we’d have a compelling indication that our intention had had an effect.
We decided that the study would run from Sunday to Sunday, starting with September 14 and culminating on September 21, the International Day of Peace. As this was a pilot experiment, our first thought was to deliberately keep participant numbers low, again to keep the website from crashing, but things were coming together quickly and I was confident I could find a target easily, so I decided to tempt fate and get my own Intention Experiment community excited by announcing the event in July.
In order to carry out this activity as a legitimate experiment and not just an exercise in goodwill, you need something almost impossible to find in a war: a very precise means of record-keeping of casualties. That immediately eliminated areas of Africa and the Middle East—and indeed most areas of conflict on earth. I also needed a fairly obscure target—one that no Westerners were praying for—so that any change would more likely be the results of our intentions and not a multitude of other possibilities. What we were dealing with was so subtle that we had to control for any outlandish situation, including the possibility that we might have intention “contamination” from people who were already praying for our target group before we started, which would make it impossible for us to claim that any changes in the target had been solely due to the mental influence of the experiment’s participants. After all, Konstantin’s first experiment had shown a certain amount of thought “contamination” when participants managed to log on to the website too early.
Jessica Utts wanted to be able to use more than a few years’ worth of weekly violence data, starting from two years before our experiment until a few months afterward, in order to have a long statistical tail with which to compare. This meant we were looking for a war in which someone had been carefully counting the bodies, had been counting them for years, and was willing to reveal the actual numbers to me.
Throughout the summer I called and emailed every peace organization around the world suggested to me. I called the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University in Sweden. I got hold of the United States Institute of Peace in Washington. I called centers for peace and conflict management at three universities. Each department had good ideas but little access to data. Somebody referred me to Joshua Goldstein, who had tracked war fatalities in Israel for a month in 2002, and then to a professor at Harvard named Doug Bond, who had set up a system devoted to gathering casualty statistics about America’s two wars in the Middle East, but I was unable to connect with either of them. Jason Campbell at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, DC, was an excellent source of published data on fatalities in Iraq, but its reports supplied only monthly figures, when I needed daily or weekly numbers.
The US government’s Worldwide Incidents Tracking System (http://wits.nctc.gov), which was essentially tracking every terrorist-related death in the world, only offered information up until March 2008. We’d have to wait about eight months after our event to find out if we’d had any impact. When I decided to phone the organization to see if I could get any more recent data, the website did not have a telephone or other contact information—and neither did the web or directory information. I called all over the State Department in Washington, DC, and nobody seemed to have heard of the organization. I got passed from department to department until finally I got connected to the US government’s National Counterterrorism Center, a Jack Bauer–type unit within the State Department. The person at the other end of the phone sounded startled that I’d got through and refused to identify herself but was nevertheless extremely interested in what I was planning to do with two years’ worth of casualty information about the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and why it was that I was so curious about specific terrorist activity. After a few minutes, she refused to speak further about anything other than to demand more information about me and my Social Security Number.
Iraq Body Count, a website publishing a fairly up-to-date daily body count of deaths due to the Iraq War, was manned by volunteers who had their hands full, they wrote, “simply documenting the daily carnage in Iraq.”
I was starting to get frantic. It was late August by that time, our experiment was nineteen days away, and I still didn’t have a plausible target, a particularly nerve-racking situation, as I already had six thousand people signed up to participate. At that point I still hadn’t publicized the event in any major way, because I still wasn’t confident the website was going to work if I overloaded it, and I planned to keep it to under twenty thousand participants, but news of the project had already gone viral on the web. A number of large organizations—Gaiam, H2Om, the Association for Global New Thought, the people behind What the Bleep Do We Know!? and its official website, the Oneness organization, the Brahma Kumaris, Intent.com—had announced the experiment to their groups, and hundreds more were signing up to participate every day. How could I have thought that it would be easy to find this perfect, well-recorded war?
One of my correspondents suggested that we limit our search to parts of Sri Lanka, where a bloody civil war had raged for twenty-five years. With so much focus on Middle Eastern and Islamic terrorism, this part of the world map had been largely overlooked by America. It might be the perfect virgin target. I could be confident that it was attracting very few Western prayers.
After writing to four more organizations with record-keeping systems with no response, I was on the verge of calling off the experiment when my contact at Uppsala Conflict Data Program suggested that I try to get hold of the Foundation for Coexistence (FCE) in Colombo, Sri Lanka, which had pioneered an “Early Response Database” record-keeping system and had been tracking the casualties in Sri Lanka for many years. As they continuously monitor both areas for daily rates of killings and violence and feed all firsthand information into a database, they would easily be able to provide us with two years’ worth of casualties that had occurred before our experiment and regular updates after our intention week. I followed a thread of leads from Brandeis University in Boston to Manchester University in the United Kingdom, and finally to Madhawa “Mads” Palihapitaya, acting director of development for the Massachusetts Office of Dispute Resolution in Boston, FCE’s representative in the United States, who directed me to FCE’s former chairman, the noted peace activist Dr. Kumar Rupesinghe.
Rupesinghe is the Gandhi of Sri Lanka, a former publisher who helped to found and now chairs the FCE, a humanitarian organization focusing on peace, human security, and conflict resolution. Under Rupesinghe’s direction, the FCE had produced a model for dispute resolution and coexistence between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, better known as the Tamil Tigers, or LTTE, the well-armed and trained rebel forces, and the Muslims and Sinhalas, the two majority communities of different faiths. By addressing the grievances of all sides, the FCE had helped to lower violence in Sri Lanka’s Eastern Province, and as a consequence, Rupesinghe had been trying to persuade organizations and governments around the world to develop similar programs for early-warning systems, coalition building, and burden sharing in civil wars.
Despite these first inroads, in 2008 there was still no end in sight to either the violence or the war. The Tamil Tigers had arisen in response to discrimination against the Tamils in Sri Lanka by the majority populations, and for twenty-five years they’d waged a campaign to create an independent state in the north and east for the Tamil people. Over that quarter century the Tigers had become a smooth-running military machine, pioneering a number of firsts in terrorist activity: the first organization to invent and make regular use of the suicide belt; the first to forcibly recruit children into terrorist activities; the first to choose women as suicide bombers. By the time of our Peace Intention Experiment, they’d notched up well over three hundred suicide bombings, the greatest number of any terrorist organization, and the most audacious of terrorist assassinations, including two world leaders—Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa—and an unsuccessful attempt on a third, then Sri Lankan president Chandrika Kumaratunga, which nevertheless resulted in the loss of her right eye. Ten months before our experiment, in an attempt to kill Sri Lankan minister Douglas Devananda, a woman named Sujatha Vagawanam had detonated a bomb hidden inside her bra, an attempt that proved unsuccessful but that was entirely captured on someone’s mobile phone and uploaded to YouTube.
Over the years, ceasefire talks had broken down four times, the last in January 2008; after May, the Sri Lankan government had given up and simply decided to exterminate the organization by whatever means necessary. At the height of their power, the Tamils had controlled three-quarters of Sri Lanka’s landmass; by the time of our experiment, the government forces had recaptured the East, but violence still waged there, and the Tamils had choked off the entire North of the country, where they maintained their stronghold, displacing more than two hundred thousand people. Some three hundred forty thousand people had been killed in the course of the long conflict, and a half million were presently living in refugee camps. The December before, both the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International jointly implored the UN Human Rights council to end the civil rights abuses of both sides.
When I described our project to Rupesinghe, he was delighted to share his data without charge. In fact, as it happened, the FCE had begun a house-to-house No to Violence initiative that same month, which was to culminate in a candlelight ceremony to be held on International Peace Day—the evening after our experiment. “We will call upon the entire country to raise a flag in their house, with the symbol of our campaign, and then light a lamp and pray or meditate for five minutes,” he wrote. “In the evening there will be mass vigils in the entire country with candles and lamps.” He was calling on Catholic bishops, Christian leaders, Buddhist monks, Hindu swamis, and Muslim imams to follow suit and lead their following in prayers. “Since it will be a Sunday, Christians will be going to church, and we are requesting them to ring a bell,” he said. “All religions will be asked to toll their bells accordingly.” He asked me to ask our network to follow their example and light a candle that final Sunday evening.
I could not believe the synchronicity of our two campaigns ending on the same day. “This,” I wrote back, “feels divinely inspired.”