During the workshops that I began holding regularly, the Power of Eight groups were experiencing a transcendent state identical to that of the large Peace Intention Experiment participants when sending an intention: the same extraordinary physical connection, feeling the essence of the person we were sending healing energy to, the same physical effects on the receivers (“felt tingling in my hands and feet and warmth throughout my body”), the same overwhelming emotions with the senders, experiencing “the palpable, strong sense of beautiful pure giving energy coming from the entire group,” the same sense of being “bigger than my body,” the same longer-term effects—“physical and emotional sensations stayed with me for hours afterwards”—the same powerful feeling of “coming home.”
They talked about unbearable heat and feelings of energy, of being in a deeper meditative state than they’d been in before, of connections with the other members of the group that were more profound than they’d ever felt.
And they were beginning to act “of one mind.” During the healing intentions, they imagined the recipient healthy and well in every way, and many would record having the same visualization as other group members, or at least something strikingly similar. In one workshop in the Netherlands, a group was sending intention to heal the back problems of a woman named Jan. Most of the members of the group had an identical and very detailed visualization of the recipient’s spine being lifted from her body and infused with light.
Recently, in a workshop in Kuwait, while sending intention to a group member with asthma and hay fever, three of the group members had an identical image of the receiver walking freely in a park without being affected by pollen. And in Brazil, Fernanda had participated in a group sending intention to someone with pain in her left hip. During the intention Fernanda felt intense itching in the same place on her own left hip, and woke up in the middle of the night with pain in the same place. The following day, the pain had vanished. Later that morning she discovered that the receiver of her intention had woken up at the exact same time that night, and by that next day his pain was also gone.
So perhaps the strange physical and mental effects experienced by members of the global Intention Experiments and the Power of Eight groups were being caused by a mystical state. For a time, I thought that my participants were simply describing a coherent brain state achieved by the act of deep group meditation, but I soon abandoned that idea. In the case of the Peace Experiment, no one was connected together. Each of the many thousands had been sitting in front of their computer screens, most of them alone, connected to one another only by an internet site.
I had the who, what, when, where—the essential, easy-to-come-by components of the reporter’s checklist—but not the why or how the participants experienced such a profound state of consciousness. I was consumed by the need to find some sort of scientific explanation. Studies that have been performed during mystical states suggest that the brain indeed goes through an extraordinary transformation. The late Eugene d’Aquili of the University of Pennsylvania and his colleague Andrew Newberg, a fellow of the university hospital’s nuclear medicine program, have spent their careers examining the neurobiology of the Holy Instant. As Newberg writes, “We know that gentle contemplative practices like mindfulness meditation predict an improvement in one’s mood, empathy, and self-awareness. But Enlightenment is something else, marked by a sudden and intense shift in consciousness.” D’Aquili and Newberg carried out a two-year study examining the brain waves of Tibetan monks and Franciscan nuns at prayer using SPECT, or single-photon emission computed tomography, a high-tech brain imaging tool that traces blood-flow patterns in the brain. Newberg discovered that feelings of calm, unity, and transcendence, such as during these peak experiences, show up as a sudden and dramatic decrease in activity in the brain’s frontal lobes (behind the forehead) and in the parietal lobes, at the back of the top of the head.
The purpose of the parietal lobe is to orient us in physical space, letting us know which end is up or how narrow a passageway is, so that we can navigate through it. This part of the brain also performs a critical function, possibly the most critical function of all: it figures out where you end and the rest of the universe begins, and it does this by getting constant neural input from every sense of the body in order to distinguish “not-self” from “self.” In each study of peak experience, Newberg and d’Aquili discovered that the “you/not-you” dial was turned sharply downward. “At the moment they experienced a sense of oneness or loss of self,” writes Newberg, “we observed a sudden drop of activity in the parietal lobe.” According to their brains, their Buddhist monks and Franciscan nuns were having trouble locating the borderline between themselves and the rest of the world. “The person,” wrote Newberg later, “literally feels as if her own self is dissolving.”
Ultimately, the meditators and praying nuns experienced a “total shutdown” of neural input on both right and left parietal lobes, leading to a subjective sense of absolute spacelessness, a “sense of infinite space and eternity” and also a limitless sense of self. “In fact,” writes Newberg, “there is no longer any sense of self at all.”
With sudden reduced activity in the frontal lobes, logic and reason would also shut down, notes Newberg. “Normally, there’s a constant dialogue going on between your frontal and parietal lobes,” he writes, but if activity changes radically in either area, “everyday consciousness is radically changed.”
In active meditation, where the object is to focus intensely upon some thoughts or particular subject of intention, Newberg discovered that the boundary of me/not-me becomes blurred, but the area of attention, in a sense, takes over. Participants in both the large global Intention Experiments and the Power of Eight groups were also being asked to focus intensely on a particular subject, and in a sense the subject may have taken over their minds.
The left parietal lobe shows a restriction of neural input, causing a blurring of the sense of self, whereas the right parietal lobe, which receives instruction to focus more intensely upon the object of attention, is deprived of any neural input other than the object of intention.
It has no choice, Newberg writes, but to create a spatial reality out of the object of contemplation—the intention for peace, in our case—enlarging it “until it becomes perceived by the mind as the whole depth and breadth of reality” and the person feels completely and mystically absorbed into the object of his intention. Many of our participants had indeed recorded this sense of a mystical union with Sri Lanka.
Newberg is quick to note that this brain activity is reflective of a particular state of consciousness—a signature of it, essentially—not its cause. He distances himself from the strict materialists, who claim these states are entirely induced by the brain, and emphasizes that his scientific research “supports the possibility that a mind can exist without ego, that awareness can exist without self” and that his work simply offers “rational support” for these spiritual concepts and for mystical spirituality.
Newberg’s work was amplified by the research of Mario Beauregard, a neuroscientist at the Department of Psychology at the University of Arizona, who used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to analyze the brain activity in real time of a group of Carmelite nuns during intense spiritual experiences. The results of these experiments clearly showed that different brain regions, relating to emotion, body representation in space, self-consciousness, visual and motor imagery, and even spiritual perception were activated, producing brain states that are utterly unlike those of ordinary waking consciousness. There was strong evidence, Mario told me, for people being literally out of their mind and into an altered state of consciousness during a mystical experience.
Could the altered state have been set off by the music I’d been playing during all the groups and the experiments? Some studies show that a rhythm like the Reiki chant we played can trigger a mystical state by altering the normal activity of the temporal lobes. But in my own experiments, a good percentage of the participants had not been able to gain access to all aspects of the experiment: the music hadn’t worked, they missed the initial Powering Up, or they couldn’t gain access to certain pages for the Peace Experiment. And it didn’t seem to make a difference to their experience. This meant that the essential element, the thing that must have provided lift-off, was participation in a group devoted to the idea of sending out a prayer in unison.
Why would group thought induce such an extreme transformational state?
Group meditation and prayer certainly promoted a sense of unity among practitioners, but not in the intense way experienced by the Peace Experiment participants. I tried to think of other experiences that might induce that kind of extreme altered state, particularly those where the brain waves of participants had been studied.
One similar situation might be a Pentecostal Church experience, where attendees end up being so taken over that they speak in tongues. The Pentecostal movement, begun in the 1900s, and then amplified in the charismatic churches, now constitutes one-quarter of the entire Christian world. Members of the Pentecostal Church believe if they are given the gift of “tongues,” they are endowed with the gifts of the Holy Spirit and are able to heal others and prophesy the future. Church members describe the experience as the words being produced through them and not really emanating from themselves at all. The state is usually induced by music and singing in a group setting, within a congregation. As it happened, Andrew Newberg has studied the brain states of a small group of Pentecostal Church members before and after they’d got into a state of speaking in tongues to see if their brain patterns mirrored the monks and nuns he’d studied while in a transcendent experience.
As with his earlier studies, Newberg discovered a sudden drop in frontal lobe activity, but no decrease in parietal lobe activity, and indeed his Pentecostal subjects described their experience as like having a conversation with God, where they do not lose a sense of self, but retain a sense of God’s otherness.
Newberg also used SPECT and fMRI technology to study the brain waves of mediums and Sufi masters performing a chanting and movement meditation called Dhikr and found an identical brain signature to that of his monks and nuns: a shutting down of frontal and parietal lobe activity, in particular on the right side of the brain. This brain state would make it easier to access creative imagination, says Newberg, and a sense of oneness. And the larger the decrease in frontal and parietal lobe activity, the more likely the participants would experience all the stages of enlightenment. The greatest changes occurred in the right frontal lobes, the area of the brain associated with negative thinking and worry, which might explain why those experiencing a state of enlightenment often describe feelings of bliss.
Besides these feelings of unity, my participants also had a strong sense of having been part of a profound and significant effort. “I felt that I was important doing something like that,” wrote Mónica of Mexico City. They felt hopeful, a sense of “human solidarity,” an end to their feelings of isolation, part of a “deep sense of Connection. Placement. Purpose,” a “major global project,” an “obligation” they should take “very seriously,” with a “deep sense of longing” after the experiment was over. “I felt a greater sense of purpose than my small life,” wrote Barbu from Greenwich, Connecticut. “I felt compelled,” wrote Lynne, a doctor in Seattle, “to do this.”
In her classic book Mysticism, Evelyn Underhill writes that mysticism:
is not individualistic. It implies, indeed, the abolition of individuality, of the hard separateness, that ‘I, Me, Mine’ which makes of man as an isolated thing. It is essentially a movement of the heart, seeking to transcend the limitations of the individual standpoint and so surrender itself to ultimate Reality; for no personal gain, to satisfy no transcendental curiosity, to obtain no other-worldly joys, but purely from an instinct of love.
Perhaps the opportunity to join together with strangers in what is essentially modern-day prayer creates a powerful state of completion for individuals, and it is this that Jesus meant by the idea of praying homothumadon. We move away from our isolated state of individuality and enter a pure bond with other humankind—a state that is familiar when felt but rarely experienced in modern times. From a neurological point of view, as Newberg describes it, “When your frontal lobe activity drops suddenly and significantly, logic and reason shut down. Everyday consciousness is suspended, allowing other brain centers to experience the world in intuitive and creative ways.” “Decreases in the parietal lobe activity,” he adds, “can also allow a person to have intensive feelings of unity consciousness.”
The results of the Peace Experiment had been provocative, but ultimately meaningless, unless I ran many more experiments, which I planned to do once the dust had settled on this one and I could gather more resources. But as I began to realize, the question of whether it had “worked” or not appeared to be increasingly beside the point. Perhaps the success of the experiment had nothing to do with the actual outcome.
Intending as a group created what could only be described an ecstasy of unity—a palpable sense of oneness. A cosmic power seemed to work through us, providing a feeling repeatedly described as “coming home.” The responses from participants suggested that the group-intention experience breaks down separation between individuals, allowing them to experience the “God consciousness” of pure connection. Many found it profoundly transforming, an opening into a reality they never knew existed.
I could accept that people were moved, even changed by the experience, and felt connected to the other people and the target, but then I began reading answers like these:
“I had very specific healing experiences on all days.”
“I have been feeling grounded and even tempered lately. More productive and self-determining.”
I had never considered that the experience might have residual effects. The survey answers filled out by participants seemed to be the real point here, and it turned many confident New Age assumptions about the power of intention—with the exclusive focus on the object of desire—on their head.
The true point had nothing to do with the outcome of the experiment and everything to do with the act of participation. Perhaps praying together as a group affords a glimpse of the whole of the cosmos, the closest you can get to an experience of the miraculous. And it may be that this state, like a near-death experience, changes you forever.