Jeff Levin had never had heard of anything like the rebound effects experienced by our participants. Nor had Larry Dossey, a medical doctor and author of numerous books on prayer and healing. Nor had any other experts I consulted. Most of the research they could offer me about transformation and healing examines the power of ritual to bring it about. Many esoteric traditions speak to the ability of the mystical experience itself, induced through some sort of extreme practice, to eliminate psychological illness. In the Hindu tradition, the point of yoga (union) is Samadhi, the mystic union with the all that is, and some of Levin’s research has uncovered the healing power of various yogic rituals to “obliterate” psychological stress and help restore a person to the natural rhythms of health.
He largely reiterated what I already knew about prayer circles: they were used by American Native Americans and other indigenous groups, and modern-day charismatic Catholic and Pentecostal congregations, as well as by many Protestant churches. The closest parallel to the effect of my intention circles that Levin could offer was research he’d unearthed showing that certain rituals for healing could produce changes in emotion, self-awareness, and the sense of oneself and one’s capacities among those taking part, and also bring about improvements in neurobiological mechanisms, such as neurotransmitters and immune markers, all of which would make for healthier relationships. But every single one of the healing practices he could think of counted on certain extreme rituals to bring about effects. As noted social commentator Barbara Ehrenreich recounts in her book Dancing in the Streets, ecstatic practices have been a central part of most cultures since prehistoric times, but invariably involve elaborate pageantry and ritual.
Even modern secular group rituals such as those used at a camp for Wiccan lesbians or bisexuals who’d suffered sexual violence made use of a variety of rituals: healing charms, chanting, and immersion in water. Deborah Glik, a professor of Community Health Sciences at the University of South Carolina who studied the effects of both New Age and more traditional religious healing groups in Baltimore, discovered that these types of rituals often triggered altered states of consciousness, which themselves had healing effects. Ted Kaptchuk, director of the Harvard-wide Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter, maintains that rituals of any kind, whether relating to Navajo circles or even Western medicine—particularly those infused with elaborate pageantry, costume, sound, movement, touch, and symbols—create powerful healing mechanisms in the bodies of the participants through “layers of sensations and behaviors”:
Healing rituals create a receptive person susceptible to the influences of authoritative culturally sanctioned “powers.” The healer provides the sufferer with imaginative, emotional, sensory, moral and aesthetic input derived from the palpable symbols and procedures of the rituation process—in the process fusing the sufferer’s idiosyncratic narrative unto a universal cultural mythos. Healing rituals involve a drama of evocation, enactment, embodiment and evaluation in a charged atmosphere of hope and uncertainty.
The late anthropologist Roy Rappaport elaborates on this idea. These kinds of practices are so powerfully effective, he writes, because they provide “an evocation of space, time and words separate from the ordinary; a pathway of enactment that guides and envelops the patient; a concrete embodiment of potent forces; an opportunity for evaluation of a new status.”
So removing people from their day-to-day environment, infusing them with unfamiliar sounds, rhythms, and ceremony, guiding them through a certain powerful all-enveloping sensory experience, having some sort of evidence of supernatural powers at play, and offering a powerful expectation of change all can prompt emotional healing by focusing emotions on what Rappaport once referred to as “the calculated intensification” of the message. In a way, all these researchers were suggesting that this kind of overwhelming sensory experience works through what is essentially the power of suggestion. The transformational experience is triggered when the mind develops a strong expectation of change. Indeed, Kaptchuk claims that placebo effects are “the ‘specific’ effects of healing rituals.”
None of this offered an adequate explanation of the effect of our Peace Experiment. Our participants had not been taken out of the day to day, but remained in familiar environments, using familiar equipment. Compared to the pageantry of a Navajo healing ritual, the sight and sound we’d provided via our website and “Choku Rei” had been fairly austere. The only symbol we’d offered was a picture of a few teenage boys of different religions, arm in arm—hardly “potent forces” that “envelop” and eventually overwhelm those taking part in a massive sensory experience. There was no emotionally charged environment of potent forces because we weren’t even experiencing these rituals as a collective in the same room. Furthermore, we had no “message” to be “calculatedly intensified” and no authoritative figure with “culturally sanctioned powers”; in the Peace Experiment, I didn’t have a strong presence on the website. The same was true with the Power of Eight groups in my workshops. Even though the participants were present in the same room, they did not take part in much ritual or work with an authoritative presence. The groups usually ran by themselves, after some initial instruction by me, and when organizing people into circles, I usually distanced myself from the effects. I’d never claimed there would be any beneficial effects on my participants. As far as they knew, their participation in either the Peace Intention Experiment or a Power of Eight group was an entirely selfless act.
So if it wasn’t the ritual or a shaman in charge or the sight-and-sound overwhelm, what about some sort of group effect? Could our participants have experienced positive effects from the experience of being part of a collective, which New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the “hive hypothesis”? Haidt’s theory is that people reach the highest level of human flourishing by losing themselves in a larger group. Haidt had built upon the work of the nineteenth-century social scientist Émile Durkheim, one of the first to study the effect of community upon the individual, who referred to the effect of ritual on a group as “a collective effervescence.”
“The very act of congregating is an exceptionally powerful stimulant,” writes Durkheim. “Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation. Every emotion expressed resonates without interference in consciousnesses that are wide open to external impressions, each echoing the others.”
Durkheim also argued that once an individual experienced this state, he enjoyed higher levels of happiness afterward.
This kind of “collective effervescence” was more than evident in mass gatherings such as pilgrimages. Every year, some one hundred million participants gather at the banks of the river Magh Mela in northern India to bathe in its reputedly sacred waters during a pilgrimage at Allahabad. Contrary to every expectation, the attendees record higher levels of physical and mental well-being than normal, despite greater risks to health from communicable diseases, poor sanitary facilities, and the cramped and temporary living conditions of a mass gathering. Researchers from the Centre of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Allahabad found that participants were actually in greater health at the end of the pilgrimage than when they’d set off on it, even when the physical conditions were harsh. The scientists concluded that a key ingredient in the association between well-being and religious belief or practice involves “the collective dimension.”
The same inoculation from ill health occurred at Woodstock, the legendary 1969 music festival in upstate New York. Despite the extraordinary overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, bad weather, and lack of provisions, no fights or rioting broke out, and the nearly half million attendees experienced a transcendent feeling of connectedness.
Native Maoris report getting a “fire walker’s high,” an increase in heart rate and a boost in levels of happiness during mass rituals of fire walking. Even group events using repetitive sounds like drumming are healing, causing a lowering of levels of stress hormones and an improvement in immune-system function, such as increases in natural killer cell activity.
Could our Peace Experiment have created a kind of Woodstock effect?
I had to discard that hypothesis too. None of the hive theories could explain what had happened to our participants. They hadn’t been together in the same physical space; they’d only experienced Durkheim’s group “electricity” virtually. They hadn’t been participating in a healing ritual involving an individual, but one focusing on a target of social change. Despite the fact that this was no true community in any genuine sense, this virtual circle had established a deep connection to one another and gone on to heal many of the important relationships in their lives.
Could major and lasting brain changes caused by the mass group-intention experience have been responsible for these transformations? Certainly meditation and shamanic ritual are known to affect the brain. According to Dr. Stanley Krippner, professor of psychology at Saybrook University in California who has made a vast study of indigenous ritual, shamanic rituals create major neural changes, causing the two halves of the brain to synchronize, leading to better integration between what is generally considered the executive part of the brain (the cortex) and the emotional center (the limbic system) and greater synthesis of thought, emotion, and behavior. Essentially, collective rituals help the brain to become more emotionally mature and so help the person act better toward others.
During transcendental states like deep meditation, the brain becomes more coherent, and the executive part of the brain becomes more adept at decision-making. Neuroscientist Dr. Fred Travis, director of the Center for Brain, Consciousness and Cognition at the Maharishi School of Management, discovered this after carrying out electroencephalogram (EEG) readings of the brains of meditators. As with shamanic rituals, after this kind of experience, your brain gets more organized, and various parts of the brain—the intuitive center and the cognitive forebrain—communicate better with each other. Cosmic Consciousness spills over into everyday life, and the brain becomes better at navigating one’s world. This could explain why participants recorded such improvements in their relationships. The physical act of intending as a group, which starts off as a mass meditation, induces a state that would essentially train the brain to improve reactions to other people and help individuals to get better at the business of relating. However, these kinds of effects are measurable usually after months or even years of regular meditation. The radical changes in our Peace Intention Experiment participants were showing up after eight days of ten-minute intention sessions.
Acting in synchrony, engaging in a common intention statement or even in the same rhythmic activity with a shared intention, leads to greater social bonding, and this in itself can have a powerful healing effect. Harvey Whitehouse, a statutory chair of social anthropology at the University of Oxford and a leading expert in the science of religion, has written that a ritual involving a “high-arousal cluster” historically has led to the formation of small cohesive communities. Ample evidence shows that being part of any sort of community enhances healing. When I studied stress and its effect on illness, I discovered that the greatest cause of psychological or physical illness is a feeling of isolation—from others, from our family, from our God. Consequently a potent healer of stress in any area of life is simply establishing a strong connection. For instance, in research examining the level of stress among those experiencing financial hardship, even Latino Americans in the lowest income brackets experienced far less depression so long as they regularly attended church and participated in the religious community, and elderly Latinos remained more robust, no matter what the level of poverty, so long as they lived in tight-knit neighborhoods.
I felt I was getting closer to a big first clue about the cause of the amazing transformation experienced by Peace participants, and it had to do with exactly what is meant by “health” and “healing.” Many of these esoteric traditions define health as something far greater than an absence of anything going physically awry. For them, true health requires pure and total integration into the whole, a sense of absolute connectedness, while illness results from a sense of alienation from that source. This suggests that genesis of most disease is not the smaller stresses of our lives, but the stress generated by our global response to life: how we perceive our place in the world, particularly within our immediate environment. If that is the case, connecting with others for a singular purpose would be profoundly healing, a palpable reminder that you are part of a greater whole.
Believing in something greater than yourself has a healing power in itself. In his research on many religious faiths, Jeff Levin has discovered that the central tenet of all different traditions is that the universe is not subject to random processes but possesses a divine order, and this belief in a divine plan, a sense that there is a purpose to everything that unfolds in the world, itself is powerfully transformational in every regard.
Those two thoughts were echoed repeatedly by the Peace Experiment participants:
“My mantra for daily life is: I am free, I am Love, and this is what my intention is for everybody I met, because we are ONE GLOBAL FAMILY.”
“I sense a unity of being—a common thread which weaves us together in truth.”
“I feel encouraged about the future—that this type of activity can create a powerful change for the better.”
“Now I believe that there is hope for my country.”
“This changes my view on me and life. It gives me hope for a better world.”
“I feel more empowered. I feel more connected with the planet.”
“More positive about the changes taking place in the world and the direction that we are moving towards is one of unity.”
“Hope. Filled.”
Maslow distinguishes between two types of mystical experiences—the “green” type—which is a transient peak experience of ecstasy—and the “mature” type, which produces a more long-lasting transformational shift in the person. “In its mature form, [the transcendent experience] represents an ultimate expression of self-actualization and social integration,” Jeff Levin writes. “In this context, definitions of health, spiritual well-being, and personal development seem to intersect.” From that perspective, Levin believes that the “mature” type of mystical experience, as Maslow defines it—the kind experienced by my participants—is a powerful physical and psychological preventive because it represents the ultimate sense of belonging and purpose in the world. Many experts on the mystical experience concur that the transcendent experience has the power to make permanent changes in the individual in every regard, leading to a sense of a calling to do something altruistic. Maslow says that those undergoing this experience invariably feel an “all-embracing love for everybody and everything, leading to an impulse to do something good for the world,” and Evelyn Underhill describes it as being “called to a life more active, because more contemplative, than that of other men.” The Indian guru Sri Aurobindo once claimed that “bringing down” the “supermind” and “overmind” not only proves healing to the recipient but also to his entire environment.
After the Peace Intention Experiment, a goodly number of our participants felt compelled to change something major in their lives.
“I applied to the Peace Corps.”
“I signed the nonviolence pact.”
“I feel more committed to regular monthly mass meditation.”
“I am setting up a team to develop a formula for peace based on my understanding of Sri Lanka.”
“I immediately started looking for a place to start my own private practice in energy medicine. Quit my hospital job.”
It might have been that a large-scale Intention Experiment acts as a potent reminder of what we’re supposed to be. The feeling of perfect integration, symbolized by a giant circle of strangers all praying together, offers a sense of purpose—the universe “has meaning and order and that he or she has a place in that order,” as social scientists Deirdre Meintel and Géraldine Mossière from the University of Montreal once put it. I wondered if the healing effects my participants had experienced had mostly to do with a feeling of perfect global trust, that so rarely experienced sense that life truly loves us.
Perhaps the key to the healing effects was indeed this sense of trust. James W. Pennebaker, chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas, has spent more than three decades studying the power of trusting others. His research reveals the power of “opening up.” People who can trust others enough to be vulnerable enjoy improvements in immune function, autonomic nervous system activity and psychological well-being, and fewer visits to the doctor.
I witnessed this especially in our Power of Eight circles, where participants revealed intimate details of their health issue to one another. Daniel described what happened with his spine; Rosa, her struggles with her thyroid. In that circumstance, both the discloser and the recipient of someone’s secret life require a level of trust that in itself can prove healing. Pennebaker has also studied the social dynamics of opening up and sees it as the primary driver in therapy, perhaps even the primary driver in prayer circles. Disclosure is all about telling someone our story, said Pennebaker.
If so, what we were doing in our healing circles was editing the story, rewriting the details together, offering the possibility of a more positive ending. Perhaps that group process of revision, the idea that you could rewrite a life story or even the story of a wounded country, proves healing to everyone, both the protagonist and those with the pencil in their hands.