I now needed another bit of divine intervention in the form of a new website.
The greatest remaining challenge was to figure out how exactly this experiment should be run on the internet. Ning had been an excellent, low-cost solution to our smaller experiments and our first attempt to use linked server power, but I was not confident that our present configuration could handle an experiment of this size. As before, we planned to carry out the experiment on a platform other than our main Intention Experiment website, with enough distributed network power to handle the numbers. Months before, we’d been introduced to Jim Walsh, the owner of a company called Intentional Chocolate, who generously offered to pay for bigger server power.
Jim had a webmaster in mind to create the site and run the event, and we sent over all our specs, but he then wrote to say that although we had the server in place, his colleague couldn’t host it. We were stuck without a website or webmaster. We just couldn’t afford the thousands of dollars for the team who had helped us with the early leaf and seed experiments.
It was September 4 by that time—ten days to go. I was again faced with the prospect of calling off the event when I remembered that at a gathering earlier that summer I’d been introduced to Sameer Mehta and his colleagues, a group of seasoned web designers from Copperstrings, a media website running from India and organized by Tani Dhamija, an acquaintance of ours in the United Kingdom. I pulled out their card and got hold of Joy Banerjee and Sameer. When I explained my position, they generously offered to donate the company’s time to set up the experiment and run it on Copperstrings’ platform, which was large enough to cope with thousands of visitors. I couldn’t believe it. This time, the experiment would cost us absolutely nothing.
Sameer and his team created a separate website and sign-up page, but with one major change: his team would create pages that would automatically flip over during the various stages of the experiment to minimize individual computer problems and boost the chances of the highest number participating. And no one would get in prematurely, as had happened with that first water experiment of Konstantin’s.
When September 14 finally arrived, a technical person from Copperstrings stood by to help anyone who was having trouble getting through the website’s front door. Our Reiki Chants track had been timed to play during the ten minutes of our experiment. The majority of people—including me—gained access. I was overjoyed to watch the pages flip over on cue, first to reveal the target, complete with a map showing Sri Lanka, which “suffers one of the deadliest ongoing conflicts on earth,” it read.
Five minutes later, the page flipped over again to our intention page, showing a photo of three young boys, a Tamil, a Muslim, and a Sikh, about ten years old, all arm in arm, next to the image of a beautiful waterfall—the perfect symbol of peace restored.
We asked our participants to hold the following intention: “for peace and cooperation to be restored in the Wanni region of Sri Lanka and for all war-related violence to be reduced by at least 10 percent.” I’d quantified our request largely because of our experience with the Germination Experiment, which showed that the more specific we’d been, the more successful.
Everything seemed to be working perfectly, but after the first day’s experiment, I discovered that a few thousand people had had trouble logging in, because of the sheer size of the audience trying to access the website. More than 15,000 people had signed up, and in the end 11,468 took part. Many thousands more who couldn’t log on to the sites joined in after receiving the URL from the Copperstrings tech team. We had participation in more than sixty-five countries, and every continent except Antarctica, with the greatest numbers from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, South Africa, Germany, Australia, Belgium, Spain, and Mexico, but intenders also came from many far-flung quarters—Trinidad, Mongolia, and Nepal, Guadeloupe, Indonesia, Mali, the Dominican Republic, and Ecuador. We had nearly double the square root of 1 percent of the world’s population. Because the Apache server again had more requests than capacity, we asked the Media Temple server team to ramp up the capacity for the follow-up sessions, particularly for the final weekend.
The first feedback about the effect of our efforts was alarming. The following week, I read some preliminary news reports and FCE associate Hemantha Bandara’s first figures about the casualty rate of the week of our experiment, which suggested that violence had vastly increased during our intention week—in fact to the highest it had ever been in the two-year window being studied. Violence levels in the North escalated dramatically right at the start of our eight days of intention. The North experienced a sudden surge of attacks and killings, largely brought on by the Sri Lankan government, which mounted full-on land, sea, and air attacks to drive the Tamil Tigers from their last strongholds in the north of the island. The Sri Lankan navy sank two Tamil Tiger boats during a sea battle that broke out off the northeast coast, and killed twenty-five members of the LTTE’s Sea Tigers unit in a three-hour battle off the northwestern coast. In addition, forty-eight rebels were killed in army offensives within twelve miles of the rebel headquarters in the North, and the air force targeted the hideout of senior LTTE leaders. The government also brought the battle to the rebel’s stronghold in the Kilinochchi district, killing nineteen rebels and three soldiers. On their side, the Tamil Tiger rebels repulsed an army advance in the northern Wanni region after fighting that lasted four hours, claiming the lives of twenty-five soldiers.
With all this enhanced government activity, the killings and injuries suddenly escalated, with 461 murders and 312 people suffering serious injuries during the eight days of the experiment, compared to 142 killings and 38 injuries the week before.
The government announced that it would refuse to negotiate or offer a cease-fire until the LTTE laid down its arms: it was committed to finally repelling the LTTE in its last stronghold. Aid agencies began to leave the Wanni district because their safety wasn’t guaranteed. The renewed bombing raids forced more than 113,000 from their homes. The UN began calling on both sides to stop killing civilians. It all seemed far more than mere coincidence.
Oh my God, I kept thinking. Did we do this?
But then in the immediate aftermath of the experiment, both deaths and numbers of people injured fell dramatically, according to the weekly figures being supplied to us by the FCE. The death rate suddenly fell by 74 percent, and injuries by 48 percent. In the short term, when compared with the thirteen days immediately prior to the experiment, the post-intention death rate was not significantly lower. Average killings fell basically to what they were in the two weeks prior to the intention period. However, the injury levels remained down 43 percent from what they were in the months before the experiment started.
That was just the immediate picture. For our data to be meaningful in any way, we needed to take a longer view, backward and forward. Comparing our data with what happened over the two years and then for a month or two afterward would show us if there were any significant shift over the long term, to see if the downward trend continued or if this was as good as it was ever going to get. We also wanted to determine whether intention lasted or if it only affected violence levels for the immediate period after the intention was sent. Was it going to affect the outcome of the war in the Wanni district? The only way to find out was to sit back and wait for a few weeks for events to unfold, while handing over to Jessica Utts the weekly statistics from Hemantha, plus the weekly casualty updates from August 2006 to 2008 for the eastern and northern provinces.
From the FCE’s statistics from August 2006 to the start of the experiment, Jessica was able to model a prediction of the likely average violence levels we could expect in the months after our intention, if the fighting had carried on as normal. We then used the data from the weeks after the experiment to compare the model of what should happen to what did happen over that month. She created a preliminary time series analysis up until the week that ended on September 14, using an Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model, which helps to better understand the data and make forecasts for future events, particularly with data, like ours, that don’t stay static but fluctuate with a lot of outlier figures.
In late November, Jessica finally produced a quadratic trend analysis, a more complex model that provided a good statistical explanation for the overall pattern of the data up until the time of the experiment and a plausible modeling of what was likely to happen during and after our experiment. It revealed that violence indeed had vastly increased to levels far higher than predicted during the week of our experiment, but then over the weeks after the experiment had plummeted to well below what the model predicted should have occurred during those weeks. Deaths had begun to escalate from the seventieth week of the two-year report, steadily rising nearly week on week to the record high of our experiment, and then plunged a week later back to levels that hadn’t been seen since before the fighting had intensified.
Of course, this could all have been coincidence. We had to consider that the increase in violence just happened to occur during the week of our experiment by chance, and that the lowering of violence was simply the calm that often results after a battle. After all, the Sri Lankan government’s army had increased in size by about 70 percent that year and also increased its naval forces.
But in the months that followed, the events played out in an even more extraordinary way. From the perspective of these two-plus years, the events during that week in September proved pivotal to the entire twenty-five-year conflict. During that week, the Sri Lankan army had won a number of strategically important battles, which enabled them to turn around the entire course of the war. After our week in September, the army was able to take the fight to the Tigers on their own turf. The fighting turned into face-to-face combat as the army mounted its ruthless offensive in the North.
On January 2, 2009, the army finally expelled the separatist guerrillas from their capital of Kilinochchi. One week later, the army recaptured the strategic Elephant pass and town of Mullaitivu, opening up the entire northern Jaffna Peninsula, where mainland Sri Lanka connects with the northern peninsula, for the first time in nine years, liberating the entire Wanni district, the target of our intention. Those of the Tager Tamil terrorists who remained were wedged into a tiny corner of northeastern Sri Lankan jungle of about 330 square kilometers. After all the decisive wins in September and January, the twenty-five-year, intractable civil war ended in a bloody finish on May 16, 2009, nine months after our experiment.
Did we do this?
Certainly when we started in September, the rebels still had a tight grip on the North, and there was no foreseeable end to war. Although the army had made some inroads in August, even as recently as May commentators believed that peace talks were out of the question. When noting that the highest weekly total for violence and the most decisive battles in the entire twenty-six-month period occurred during our very intention week, Jessica had only two words to say: “Weird, huh?”
I wanted some independent verification that this was something more than coincidence, so I called upon Roger Nelson, the architect of the Global Consciousness Project and a member of our scientific team. A psychologist formerly of Princeton University, Dr. Nelson was fascinated by the idea that there may be a collective consciousness, evidence for which could be captured on REG machines, the modern-day electronic equivalent of a continuous coin-flipper developed by the PEAR team, with a random output that ordinarily produces heads and tails each roughly 50 percent of the time. In 1998, Roger had organized a centralized computer program so that REGs located in fifty places around the globe and running continuously could pour their continuous stream of random bits of data into one vast central hub through the internet. Since 1997, he has been comparing their output with events of great global emotional impact. Standardized methods of statistical analysis reveal any demonstration of “order”—a moment when the machine output displayed less randomness than usual—and whether the time that it had been generated corresponded with that of a major world event.
Over the decades, Roger has compared the activities of his machines with hundreds of top news events: the death of Diana, the princess of Wales; the millennium celebrations; the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and his wife, Carolyn; the attempted Clinton impeachment; the Twin Towers tragedy on 9/11; approval polls of Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump; the invasion of Iraq and the deposing of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Strong emotion, positive or negative—even to presidential decisions—seemed to produce a move away from randomness to some sort of order.
I asked Roger to analyze what had happened to the REG machines during our experiment.
Several analyses revealed that the machines were affected within the twenty-minute window of meditations during the eight days of our Peace Intention Experiment, and that these changes were similar to those that occurred during moments of mass meditation in areas attempting to lower violence. But the changes were most striking during the actual ten minutes of our experiment, at the exact time that we were sending intention.
The outcome of the Peace Intention Experiment was compelling but couldn’t be considered definitive. As any scientist will tell you, one result like that doesn’t really prove much. There were too many variables: the Sri Lankan government’s offensive, the natural course of the conflict, the increase and then plummeting of violence. Nevertheless, there was no doubt that the September week the Intention Experiment had been carried out had been possibly the most pivotal of any during the entire twenty-five years of the conflict. The government had gained vital traction in their progress, which enabled them to turn around the entire course of the war.
Did we do this?
Short answer: Who knows?
We would need to repeat the experiment a number of times in order to show that our intentions had affected the war in any definitive way.
But I did make one important discovery. For the first time I had decided to survey all the participants in mid-October to see how they found the experiment, mainly to check how well the Copperstrings website had held up and whether our participants had access to all the web pages.
Another reason for the survey was that I’d been puzzled by the experience of one of the intenders of an earlier experiment. On August 10, 2007, a chiropractor named Tom had written Gary after participating in the August Leaf Intention Experiment at the Los Angeles conference. Tom said he saw the aura of the leaf and saw a change in the glowing at the puncture sites. “I also had a profound ASC [altered state of consciousness]. The entire room got very dark, and the primary thing I observed in the room was the auras of other people. I see auras a fair amount; just the intensity here was significantly different.”
At the time I’d dismissed this as wishful thinking (after all, the fellow had said that he saw auras all the time), but his letter had planted one big question that remained in the back of my mind for months. Besides the effect on the target, was any of this also affecting the audience?
When the answers came pouring in from our participants, it was clear that some of the effects were rubbing off on them as well.