Sylvie Frasca, an Italian-born translator who lives in Roanne, France, always had far too much on her plate, but her work schedule the week before the Peace Intention Experiment started had been so demanding that she had been working all day and through the night. On Monday, the second day of the Peace Experiment, still exhausted from her previous week’s grueling schedule, she participated in the day’s group intention and suddenly felt lighter and physically much better. This feeling increased dramatically as the week went on and she felt a special bond growing between the other participants of the experiment and the Sir Lankans. On Tuesday, her mood became buoyant and she felt her constant worry about work leave her. By Wednesday she realized her priorities had completely changed. That evening she made a pact with herself: never again would she allow herself to be working night and day as she had done the previous week.
Her relationship with her partner was changing too. Although she practiced Reiki healing, her partner, an atheist who had always prided himself on his logical mind, refused to allow her to do Reiki on him for more than a few minutes. On Thursday, for the first time, he gave himself over to an entire hour-long session. They connected in a way they never had before. The following day they had the deepest discussion they’d ever had about Reiki, spirituality, and Sylvie’s father’s spontaneous healing from chronic sinusitis. For the first time, their discussion wasn’t forced and he was sharing the conversation rather than trying to change the subject.
On the final day of the experiment, knowing that she would be traveling back to Italy from France during the time of the experiment, Sylvie planned to send her intention from the car but asked her partner to light a candle for her and to join with the Peace ceremony himself. Shortly after the ten-minute intention, her partner called Sylvie to say that something really unusual had happened. As he was looking at the picture of the waterfall on the Peace Intention Experiment website, he felt pulled into it by a strong, warm comfortable feeling, and he came away from it overwhelmed by positive feelings. Ever since, he badgered her for more information about the experiment, trying to figure out what exactly had happened to him.
It was already clear to me that the group-intention experience caused some sort of major change in individual consciousness. But an even more complex alchemical process appeared to be going on here. Something about praying in a group caused deep, possibly permanent psychological transformation in many participants and improvements in their daily lives. The experience appeared to carry on for a majority of my participants long after the experiment was over, as though they had been touched by something immensely profound. In fact, many participants were shocked by this “borrowed benefit,” as one intender put it. “I wasn’t expecting anything personally from this and was blissfully surprised,” said Joey, from Yachats, Oregon, about his improved relationships. This ecstatic state seemed to be so powerful that it opened the possibility of individual miracles: healed relationships, major life transformations, healed lives.
Sending intention for peace seemed to have instigated some rebound effect, so that a greater sense of peacefulness infiltrated their lives. Nearly half of the thousands completing the survey reported that they felt more peaceful than usual, and this feeling of peace most affected their dealings with other people. More than two-thirds noted some change in their relationships: more than a quarter felt more love for their loved ones, and another quarter said they were getting along better with people they normally dislike or argue with. They were connecting “more, and more profoundly, with people,” “working harder to bridge differences,” feeling “more open to people,” more willing to make new friends and allow themselves to be loved, and “clearer about which relationships to nurture and which to let go.” People who annoyed them before the experiment “seem to be appearing less often” in their lives. “Tashie Delek [a Tibetan blessing] is on my lips often,” said one. These peaceful changes seemed almost infectious, affecting other members of their family, even those who hadn’t taken part.
But something even more fundamental in the ability to connect with people had been transformed in the participants, some opening of the heart that appeared to be indiscriminate and universal. Almost half claimed to feel more love for everyone with whom they came into contact, and nearly a fifth said they were getting along more with strangers. The experience of joining together with thousands of unknown others for a common purpose appeared to give many people permission to open themselves to people they didn’t know—and this readiness to connect carried on after the experiment was over. “Recently, I began saying a quick prayer (to myself) for every person I talk to. I pray, ‘God bless you, bless you, bless you, and give you a long, healthy, happy life,’ ” wrote Frances from Bay Ridge, New York. “I have experienced an increase of peace and love with each person I talk to. I realize, only now, that this practice started after the Intention Experiment.”
The Peace Intention Experiment had ignited something so powerful within them that they were able to feel more love toward the entire world.
“My love has deepened for all.”
“I feel more interested in conversing with strangers. People seem more attracted to talking with me.”
“I can see my peaceful heart resonate outward to others as we come in contact.”
“A greater connection to my fellow humans everywhere, and more accepting than judgmental.”
“I am braver to show strangers the love I feel, through kind glances.”
Some found themselves acting more peaceably in the world in every regard and thinking bigger—“pulled out of my own petty concerns,” as Sallie Lee put it. One participant decided to spend the 2008 Election Day in prayer: “As a nation, we are so polarized. Don’t feed the hatred of Bush.” Another was more easily able to cope with the passage then of California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage: “I am mightily energized, rather than angry.”
The majority reported extraordinary changes in themselves, some capacity to allow for differences of opinion and deal with it in a far more measured way:
“I listen more.”
“I accept what is and ask for help from something intangible, to improve or redirect circumstances.”
“I am more forgiving. I feel compassion towards others.”
“Gained a bit more objectivity about a couple of situations in my life.”
“More straightforwardness and honesty.”
“More able to express myself in a peaceful way.”
“More confident, at ease, and less bothered by the outside commercial pressure.”
“Less affected by things said or done to ‘egg me on.’ ”
“Try to allow room for disagreement as an option.”
“More aware of inter-office politics and how unnecessary and childish it is.”
“Less condemning, and approaching people with an open mind.”
“Conscious of unnecessary conflict much more quickly, and give up struggling with others. I honor them instead.”
A number reported positive results after experimenting with these changes of attitude in real-life situations. “Last week I dealt with a seemingly dead-end position in business in this way and both parties came out freely and with no giving in, just clearing things,” wrote Tony from Dallas. “It felt like a miracle.”
For many, participation in the experiment enabled them to be more generous toward themselves as well: “more loving”; “less critical”; “more satisfied with life”; “calmer and more grounded and even-tempered”; “more empowered and connected with circumstances”; “a greater clarity of purpose of the heart.” Many now felt both “more at ease with the world” and more satisfied with their own lives and life choices.
“More at peace with myself and more satisfied with my life in general.”
“More gratitude for the blessed life I have and compassion for others in the world.”
“More ‘at peace’ even though my external realities, especially financial, are the lowest they have been in a long while.”
“I stay close to myself and yet feel more connected with the other.”
“A certain background inner confidence on a certain level that I am a being separate from any circumstances I am in.”
“A hunger to grow as a person.”
For many months I continued to ask myself what it was about this experience that had made it so profound for the participants. Was it the thought of taking part in an international intention for peace? Or involvement in a mass event? The fact that Jesus had advocated group prayer should have been enough of an endorsement, but I still needed a twenty-first-century explanation.
Dr. Andrew Newberg once carried out a survey of more than two thousand people who’d undergone an experience of enlightenment, and discovered that people of all religious faiths (and even many atheists) shared five characteristics, regardless of the path they’d taken to that experience: a sense of unity, an extraordinary intensity of experience, a sense of clarity and new understanding, a surrender to not being in control, a sense that “something—one’s beliefs, one’s life, one’s purpose—has suddenly and permanently changed.” Many—indeed, most—of the Peace participants had experienced all five effects.
The transformations experienced by the Peace Experiment participants could have been the aftershock of undergoing such an extreme experience. A number of researchers consider mystical ecstasy one of the most powerfully emotional human experiences. As Abraham Maslow wrote, this is “the way the world looks if the mystic experience really takes. . . . If you’ve gone through this experience, you can be more in the here and now than with all the spiritual exercises that there are.” Certainly there is evidence that a transcendent experience is psychologically good for you. Andrew Greeley discovered that people who had undergone a mystical experience had a new sense of their lives and recorded far higher levels of psychological well-being than those who hadn’t had the experience. Newberg had also discovered evidence that people who experienced mystical states have far higher levels of psychological health and enjoy improved relationships, improved health, and a deeper meaning and purpose in life. In fact, in one study, terminal cancer patients who had undergone a drug-induced mystical state enjoyed the kinds of improvements in mental health ordinarily seen with psychotherapy. The scientific literature contains many case studies of patients who’d experienced spontaneous healings of a variety of conditions, even alcoholism, after a mystical experience.
But I kept going around in circles. Could it have been the meditative techniques I’d employed? The rituals I’d asked my intention group to perform had some parallels with the Rosicrucians and even some Western mystical traditions like the Anthroposophical Society. All these organizations made use of distant mental intention, with steps that included techniques not dissimilar to my Powering Up procedure—intense initial concentration, visualization, a heart-centered approach, a very specific request to the universe. In those traditions these techniques were claimed to provide a transport to the divine.
But I was left with one basic question. We had a situation of mass prayer, but the effects on the people doing the praying eclipsed the effects on the target. What past tradition found the same rebound effects? That question led me to Jeff Levin, a professor at Baylor University. Levin is a biomedical scientist and epidemiologist who is also a religious scholar, holding both a distinguished chair and directorship of the Program on Religion and Population Health at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor and an adjunct professorship of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. Devoutly religious and a member of a conservative Jewish congregation, he was the first scientist to make a systematic study of the literature on the effect of religion on physical and mental health, particularly the effect of Judaism on health. In addition to his vast study of the effects of religious healing, Levin is also one of the few to ask another very basic question: Does the transcendent experience itself have any health effects? Besides religion, Levin is passionate about healing, has studied all the major esoteric healing traditions, and continues to investigate what exactly it is in the transaction between healer and healee that is responsible for pushing the right button. In the ongoing fractious debate between science and religion, Levin has been instrumental in opening up the conversation.
If anyone could explain what was going on with the Peace Experiment and Power of Eight participants, it was going to be Jeff Levin.