It is as if my brain is wired to a bigger network.
One of the experiment’s participants had written that on his survey. And thousands more had described a similar phenomenon. These were not the enthusiastic accounts of satisfied participants. These were descriptions of nothing less than a state of mystical rapture. It appeared for all the world that my participants had entered a state of unio mystica, the stage of the spiritual path when the self feels a complete merging with the Absolute. It is the moment when, as Saint Teresa de Ávila wrote, we are “cocooned in divine love,” when, as an indigenous shaman once put it, “things often seem to blaze,” the moment, as Kabbalist mystic Isaac of Acre described, when his “jug of water” became indistinguishable from the “running well.” The Sufis and other Islamic mystics, the Kahuna in Hawaii, the Maoris, the Andean Q’ero, the Native American Indians, sages like G. I. Gurdjieff and countless other cultures have all pursued that moment, beyond time and space, where all sense of individuality disappears and you exist in a state of ecstatic union. The Course in Miracles refers to it as “the holy instant.” It is, in essence, a spiritual orgasm, and a goodly number of my participants, sitting in front of their computers on their own, apparently had just experienced it.
“I felt like I stepped into a palpable stream of energy along my arms and hands which felt like it had direction and force and mass.”
“My whole body was tingling and I was having goose bumps.”
“I felt a strong current in my body.”
“It felt as if everyone was connected to my skin.”
“It was like a solid magnetic force field all around me.”
“I did not want to leave the experience . . . it felt deep.”
“It stopped soon after the experiment.”
What on earth was going on here? Either I had momentarily hypnotized fifteen thousand people or the act of a group experience had plunged them into an altered state of consciousness. And the strangest part of all was that my participants had entered into this space effortlessly, simply by holding on to the power of a collective thought.
Most accounts of the unio mystica describe experiences that occurred individually, rather than by groups, outside of indigenous ceremony or a charismatic church service, but they aren’t as rare as supposed. At the end of his life, psychologist Abraham Maslow turned his attention to these “peak experiences,” as he called them, considering them a common element of the human condition and not simply the preserve of the mystic. He vehemently disagreed with historical accounts of these experiences as being otherworldly. “It is very likely, indeed almost certain,” he wrote, “that these older reports, phrased in terms of supernatural revelation, were, in fact, perfectly natural.”
Parapsychologist Dr. Charles Tart referred to this state as “cosmic consciousness,” a term coined by psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke. Tart studied the individual characteristics of this state in many cultures and, like Maslow, discovered certain common threads. The saint, the prophet, the mystic, the channeler, the indigenous native had all described the transcendent moment similarly, with certain definable characteristics.
Most mystical experiences include a profoundly physical component—as Bucke terms it, a “sense of inner light,” and in the case of the Peace participants, a palpable feeling of energy. Before the experiment began, I too felt an almost unbearably strong energy emanating from my computer, like a powerful force field, but I had dismissed it as my own projection until I read the survey. Many reported physical sensations that were overwhelming: hands tingled, heads ached, limbs felt heavy or painful, emotions felt raw, a powerful, infectious energy seemed to emanate from the computer. Lori, from Washougal, Washington, felt physical sensations in her chest—“an opening.” Teresa, from Albuquerque, described the feeling as being part of a power surge, “sort of like what I imagine it would be like to be locked in a tractor beam like is described on Star Trek,” she wrote. “I was being pulled along on this giant wave of energy while also being part of the cause of the wave.”
Participants also reported strange, highly detailed visualizations, almost like hallucinations, and even other sensations, like smells:
“A bright whiteness that shocked me to awareness.” (Susan, Wolfe Island, Ontario, Canada)
“A vision of the ‘Net of Indira’ net of light surrounding the globe, with a beam coming from it focused down to Sri Lanka.” (Elizabeth, Port Townsend, Washington)
“Soldiers on both sides putting down their weapons in a pile, then seeing them cultivate their crops peacefully.” (Marianne, Bournemouth, United Kingdom)
“A large group of refugees meditating and communicating with the soldiers.” (Coril, Pomona, California)
“A clear picture of arrows going back and forth in the dark, then a huge downpouring of love centered on Sri Lanka.” (Kathleen, Sonoita, Arizona)
“A slight smell of acai, honeysuckle or vanilla. We have no aromatic flowers in ours or the surrounding yards.” (Lisa, Las Vegas)
The majority of my participants had been weeping during the whole of the experiments, not, as I initially assumed, because of compassion for or identification with the Sri Lankans, but because of the power of the connection. “The first day I started sobbing,” wrote Diana from New Orleans, “not from sadness but how overwhelming it felt to be connected to so many people. It was POWERFUL.”
The fierce emotion, said Verna from Llanon in Wales, came from “the power of the experiment, during Powering Up. I never had experienced anything like it.”
Most participants had the sense of not being in control of this experience or even of their own bodies. The energy, the intention itself, and the group situation had come to inhabit them and had essentially taken them over. They were no longer breathing by themselves. Pictures appeared in their minds’ eye, they said, that weren’t anything they’d made up by themselves. They’d entered an “intense altered state,” “set up and ready to be accessed,” “a channel for a higher, spiritual power,” according to Shyama of New York City. In fact, there was even the sense that you couldn’t come back, even if you’d wanted to. “You had to just go with it,” said Lisa from Frisco, Texas.
“It sort of came over me. It filled me up and it sought a way out,” wrote Geertje, from Lierop, Netherlands.
“It was like I was on autopilot,” wrote Lars, from Braedstrup, Denmark. “I performed the experiment and it ‘performed’ me.”
While staring out of the window of the Apollo 14 on the way home to Earth, the late astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth person to land on the moon, experienced a unio mystica. It had begun with an overwhelming sense of connectedness, as if all the planets and all the people of all time were attached by some invisible web. He’d had the sensation of being part of an enormous force field, connecting all people, their intentions and thoughts, and every animate and inanimate form of matter: anything he did or thought would influence the rest of the cosmos, and every occurrence in the cosmos would have a similar effect on him. It was a visceral feeling, as if he were physically extending out to the farther reaches of the cosmos.
According to Maslow, when you enter the peak experience fully, with every pore of your being, you leave behind the corporeal essence of yourself. Edgar Mitchell had moved to a place beyond a sense of here and now, and so had the Peace participants: “As always,” wrote one veteran of our experiments after its conclusion, “time appeared to stop.”
Thousands of Peace Intention Experiment participants described a similar palpable sense of oneness, with all things appearing as a “seamless whole,” as William James once wrote. They’d experienced an overwhelming sense of unity with each other and the Sri Lankans—“so intense I could almost ‘see’ them, most certainly sense them,” wrote Marianne, from Bournemouth, United Kingdom, and a welling up of compassionate love, “a flow of energy from the earth and far, far beyond—universal,” wrote Gerda from Antwerp in Belgium, even a sense of being pulled “into a wave of light,” wrote Ramiro from Texas. It was a feeling of “being light joining with thousands of lightbeams and becoming a vast glowing entity,” wrote Filippa, from Mariedfred, Sweden, of “being part of a group mind,” said Eoin, from Dublin. The majority reported being overwhelmed by a surge of compassionate love, an overwhelming sense of unity with the other participants, or a powerful feeling of connection with the Sri Lankans.
Maslow also details another phenomenon, a sense of inner knowing, “a direct insight into the nature of reality that is self-validating,” as William James referred to it, as though the recipient has gained access to some extraordinary secret key to the universe, a glimpse of which leaves him with a sense of its perfection and a permanent certainty about the future. Bucke described his own mystical experience as a feeling “that the universe is so built and ordered that . . . all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of everyone is in the long run absolutely certain.” There is often a sense of God, but more as the “Absolute” than the anthropomorphic god of some organized religions, and a subjective feeling of immortality or eternity.
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James described the experience of a clergyman whose mystical episode felt like a face-to-face confrontation with God:
. . . my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there was a rushing together of two worlds, the inner and the outer. . . . The ordinary sense of things around me faded. For the moment nothing but an ineffable joy and exaltation remained. It is impossible fully to describe the experience. It was like the effect of some great orchestra when all the separate notes have melted into one swelling harmony that leaves the listener conscious of nothing save that his soul is being wafted upwards, and almost bursting with its own emotion.
Edgar Mitchell experienced this moment as a blinding epiphany of meaning, a sense that there were no accidents and no opportunity to derail this perfection; the natural intelligence of the universe that had gone on for billions of years and forged the very molecules of his being was also responsible for his present journey. Everything was perfect, and he had his place within that perfection. Many participants in the Peace Intention Experiment felt a similar sense of life’s perfection and a bond to all that is. Clare from Salt Point, New York, wrote that it felt like a sense of “Connection!!! To the Universe. No struggle. No doubt. Complete in Stillness.” It was, wrote Geertje from Lierop, Netherlands, a sense of certainty, of feeling “connected and at home.”
Ultimately, the experience had been ineffable, as though the person had reached a different dimension in the universe that cannot be compared to anything more earthbound. So different was it from any other state of consciousness they had experienced that they did not have the language to describe it, even in metaphor. Ana from Cheriton, Virginia, felt a powerful uplifting of energy, which appeared suddenly in the evening without her doing anything to make it happen. The room then felt “charged” with this uplifting energy. She wondered later whether she’d experienced it just because she’d decided to participate and the “energy” was provided. “It wasn’t really analyzable.” Helmie from Lierop, Noord Brabant, Netherlands, felt she was “growing and growing so big as I couldn’t describe.”
Stephen, from Northampton in the United Kingdom, felt not just an overwhelming sense of unity with the other participants, but also a very strong sense of connection to the specific objective of the experiment “MUCH more than ‘it will be good if I do this’—almost as though I was, physically, not just engaging in the process, but as though I owned it, was part of it, and it was part of me—quite profound, and hard to describe—far beyond just being ‘fully involved.’ ”
In the book Ecstasy: A Way of Knowing, Catholic priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley quotes psychologist Arnold Ludwig’s defining characteristics of an altered state of consciousness, which Greeley argues apply to mystical ecstasy, including alterations in thinking; disturbed time sense; loss of control; changes in emotional expression; a change in body image; perceptual distortions, including visualizations and hallucinations; changes in meaning or significance, particularly as regards the mystical state itself, like a eureka moment; a sense of the ineffable; and feelings of rejuvenation. Most of the Peace respondents had experienced most, if not every single one, of these states. It was Greeley’s view that anyone undergoing this state is actually afforded insight into a greater reality.
The effect on Peace Experiment participants was something more than the power of suggestion. This was like entering a different dimension.