While the Penn State team was pondering how to proceed, I returned to Gary Schwartz. We thought about what had worked in our early experiments with the Germination Intention Experiment and Korotkov’s Water Intention Experiments. Why not merge the two by carrying out a Water Germination Experiment? This time we’d send the “grow” instructions to the water, not directly to the seeds themselves.
There were several scientific precedents for this. Research had shown that a person’s state of mind when holding water used to water plants could affect their growth. Biologist Bernard Grad had carried out a small experiment watering barley seeds with salt water, which ordinarily can stunt a plant’s growth. However, he’d only watered the seeds after each vial of water had been held by one of three people: a man with a green thumb and two depressed patients. The fastest-growing plants had been watered by the green-thumbed healer, followed by those watered by one of the depressed patients, who had nevertheless grown enthusiastic about the experiment. The slowest-growing plant was watered by the vial held by the most depressed patient. Although a tiny experiment, it had a big implication, suggesting that a person’s attitude could affect the water, and in turn affect anything watered by him.
After our first Water Germination Experiment, when Gary analyzed the average level of growth, the thirty seeds watered with the “grow intention” were more than a tenth of a centimeter higher than the ninety control seeds in the control water (4.77 cm versus 4.66 cm)—a 0.05-inch difference. A statistical analysis on these numbers reached borderline significance.
We did note one interesting phenomenon, though. Ordinarily, in a Germination Experiment, all the seeds don’t sprout. In the latest experiment, only 90 percent of seeds in each of the control groups sprouted, but every last seed sprouted in the target group watered with the intended water. We tried it again but had to disqualify the study because of problems with the lab procedure.
We’d had some encouraging results, but for once I agreed with Gary that we should proceed slowly before the Lake Biwa event. We decided to go ahead with another preliminary experiment, which we dubbed the “Clean Water Experiment,” and this time we’d go back to basics. We’d examine whether we could make changes in the way in which light rays run through water—another way of looking at whether we’d made changes in the cluster structure of the water molecules—and see if these changes could be picked up by a sensitive camera.
By then, Gary was using his GDV to examine and photograph the light patterns produced by water samples, and he’d discovered that samples varying in purity produced different patterns. Mineral water and tap water, for instance, have very different-looking GDV images. Typically, bottled water generates a larger inner “water drop,” or glowing area, and a much smaller and smoother outer “aura” area than tap water, whereas tap water’s image is very diffuse, like the image of the moon during an eclipse on a particularly cloudy night. As he’d already been experimenting with this, one simple possible experiment would be to ask our audience to try to transform the glow of tap water to become more like that of mineral water. This was surely an intention statement that our audience could easily engage with.
Gary’s lab technician Mark prepared four petri dishes of tap water, photographed each dish, and emailed the images to me. These water samples were then allowed to sit for five days in a secured location until the date of the experiment so that all the water samples would become stagnant and their energy footprints would be similar. Water is a substance that needs to keep moving. When lake, river, or swamp water becomes stagnant and stops flowing freely, it can become a breeding ground for bacteria and organisms like pond scum, just as occurs in a polluted lake like Lake Biwa.
Mark took GDV photographs, and all four photos looked virtually identical, with an increased, diffuse aura around a blurred center, a situation that occurs when water becomes stagnant.
The two Clean Water Experiments attempting to change stagnant water worked, and the results were plain to see. All four GDV images of the four water samples had looked very similar beforehand, but after the intention, the photo of our target dish was very distinct, with a larger center water drop and a smoother aura—very much like the energy footprint of bottled water. The controls had smaller center water drops and more jagged outer auras.
We’d taken one more tiny step in showing that intention might be able to affect water, but it all felt rather theoretical to me. Before we headed for Lake Biwa, I wanted to try an experiment with some application to real life, using another measurement universally accepted by the scientific community.
The easiest way to demonstrate any shift in purification is to measure a change in pH. The pH of a liquid has to do with the concentration of hydrogen ions in water, compared to a universal standard, and it measures the sample’s acidity or alkalinity. The lower any pH measure is below seven, which is neutral, the more acidic the substance is, and the higher the pH above seven, the more alkaline it is. Water pH remains fairly stable, and tiny changes of one-hundredth or even one-thousandth of a unit on the pH scale can be measured; a change of a full unit or more on the pH scale would represent an enormous shift that was unlikely to be the result of an incorrect measurement. In fact, if your body’s pH goes down by just one full unit, you’re probably dead. There was a precedent for using thoughts to affect pH: Stanford University physicist William Tiller had carried out an experiment attempting to change the pH in water by intention and had managed to move the pH up and down by an entire unit.
Although the plan for Lake Biwa was to attempt to raise the water’s pH (the higher the alkalinity, the purer the water in most instances), we first attempted to lower the pH with a “Water into Wine” Experiment, largely because I wanted the audience to have a bit of fun—we were running the experiment a few weeks before Christmas. Participants would be asked to send intention to lower the pH of a sample of ordinary tap water so that it would be more acidic—more like wine. We ran the experiment twice, and it worked both times, although the changes were tiny and our audiences were modest—a thousand or so. Gary thin-sliced the time frame so that even the subtlest of changes would show up clearly. In this expanded scale, the pH of our target beaker was consistently lower than that of the controls, and our decrease in pH during the exact time we sent intention was paralleled by a small but measurable decrease in temperature (compared with the matched control). Something definitely was going on here, even if we were once again going against nature and trying to make a naturally alkaline substance more acidic. With our Lake Biwa Experiment the plan was to work with nature by trying to influence the water in the opposite—and more natural—direction.
At last I felt ready for the Lake Biwa Experiment. I enlisted Konstantin Korotkov, who was also to be speaking at Dr. Emoto’s Water and Peace Global Forum event. We would run the experiment in person with the assembled audience, but also simultaneously online, on a special internet site, again created by Copperstrings. On Sunday, March 14, I flew with my husband; our youngest daughter, Anya, then thirteen; and her friend Helen to Tokyo. Several days later we boarded the bullet train to Kyoto, speeding past Mount Fujiyama to Kyoto and finally, via a local train, to Lake Biwa, where we were met by Dr. Emoto’s family at a gala reception at Biwako Hall, the site of the conference, the following day.
Later that same evening, my husband and I climbed out onto the rocks along the shore of the choppy lake, still freezing in the March air, to scoop out two samplings of water in two different glasses to be the target and the control. We took them to Konstantin, who measured the pH of the water and then took measurements of light emissions with his GDV instrument. At the time, all measurements of both samples were virtually identical.
After Konstantin photographed both glasses, he emailed the images to me, and I sent on a photo of one of the glasses, chosen randomly by Anya and Helen, to our Copperstrings web team in India, who readied the online experiment for the following day. Once again we were creating a psychic internet: a target in Japan, a photograph held on a website in India, one audience physically present in Japan, the other virtual and scattered around the globe, all of us connected together by a tiny glass of water.
At noon Japanese time, I revealed the photo of the target water samples on my PowerPoint presentation before the live audience at the same time that our web team revealed it to the online audience on our Intention Experiment site, with the same instruction: send an intention to raise the pH of the water by imagining it as a mountain stream. I also showed them the image of a pH scale that moves from red (acidity) to blue (alkalinity), and asked the audience to move it to the right—to be more alkaline.
We didn’t have to wait long to hear the results; Konstantin was able to announce them by the end of my presentation. After our intention, our target water sample had shown a rise in pH by nearly a full pH unit and a highly significant change with the GDV equipment, as compared with that of the control water. From the data, Konstantin showed a statistical difference in the signal and intensity of the light, as compared with the control glass of water. As he continued to measure the water, he discovered that the intensity of the signal carried on, suggesting that we’d made some sort of permanent change.
Rusty Roy had been intrigued by the fact that historically water has been central in important rituals. “Besides being physically necessary to life, since ancient times, water has been closely associated with the psyche, intuition, and healing,” he wrote me before our joint experiment.
“Although this link has been ignored by modern medical research, most religious traditions give water a key place in their rituals—from baptisms and anointing to special blessings. It may well be that these blessings, given with true loving intentions, actually change the structure—hence the properties—of water.”
We hadn’t proven this with our experiment, and before we could run it again, Rusty was taken ill and died that summer. But I thought about what he was suggesting: water was used in virtually every religious tradition, not just to cleanse away impurity and sin, but also as part of a blessing. And this would mean that many religious and cultural traditions took for granted the outrageous notion, proposed by Emoto, that water can embed a thought.
I’d begun carrying out my own informal experiments with water in my Power of Eight workshop groups, intrigued by scientific evidence suggesting that water is a tape recorder.
My experiments had evolved from a demonstration conducted by Dr. Melinda Connor of the University of Arizona, which entailed asking ten members of the audience to spend a half hour in meditation, mentally sending a word (for an object like “dog”) into a small empty baby-food jar filled with water. The embedders would then be asked to write the word on a piece of paper, fold it up so it wasn’t visible, wrap it around their jar and secure it with a rubber band. Then I’d place these jars around the room, divide the audience into ten groups and ask them to move consecutively from jar to jar, silently attempting to intuit the object word that was “embedded” in each jar of water.
No matter where I was in the world, in workshop after workshop, at least half of my audience correctly identified at least one word of the ten “embedded” words, or something closely associated with the word (i.e., if the word was “dog,” they’d get “bone”).
When Peter embedded the word “barbecue” into a jar, Dorothy, standing before the bottle of water, suddenly got a strong mental image of a burger being cooked on a fire, and Sarah became very hot, as though heat were coming off the jar.
At another workshop held at a popular retreat in Austin, Texas, Janet decided to spend her meditation time in the woods near the cabin where the workshop was being held. In the midst of programming the jar with her word, she suddenly got frightened that snakes might be crawling around the woods, but knowing that the water might pick up on these thoughts, she repeatedly said to herself, “Don’t think ‘snakes.’’’
When the audience was asked to intuit the word in her jar a number of people mentioned that they got the sense of something long and slimy, and a few workshop members actually identified the word “snake.” In another similar situation at a retreat in Costa Rica, Annika had been sending “lion” into her jar when she happened to see a large iguana, which frightened her. Afterward, during our guessing session, Dimitri, one of the other participants, picked up “lion’s mane” and a few got animals, but Diane, possibly affected by the iguana, wrote down “green alligator.”
Although the weeklong Costa Rica retreat had involved just nineteen participants, we had even more extraordinary results than usual. With our first word, “conch shell,” four of the nineteen wrote down “shell,” Jolene wrote down “spiral,” and Lissa, “funnel,” and Dimitri drew a picture of a conch shell without realizing what he was drawing. For “needle,” Joao picked up “needle,” Nancy picked up “something sharp,” Lissa wrote down “something with a point,” Jolene picked up “quill,” and Dimitri, “porcupine.” For another jar, embedded with “tiger cat’s eye marble,” one saw “eye” and another a “yellow circle”; for “blue butterfly” one participant got a direct hit and Will drew the shape of a butterfly. For “crab,” one picked up “fish,” another, “jellyfish,” Lissa saw “sharp edge,” and Dimitri, “sharp nails.” Out of our nineteen participants and nine jars, fourteen got at least one hit, most had more than one, and Dimitri and Kay picked up words embedded in four of the jars.
I decided to take this one step further and try it over the telephone during my teleseminars, each time embedding a word in a baby-food-size jar of water and asking the audience over the phone or on a special Facebook page to try to pick out the word.
In one phone call I held up a jar in which I’d embedded the word “banana” and asked the audience to guess the word in the jar. When I polled them afterward, one-sixth of my audience had come up with banana, a yellow fruit (several saw “lemon”) or an object of the same shape:
“I saw the image of a banana, noticed a fresh banana smell, thought of banana popsicles, smelled and saw banana bread, strong banana images and smell.”
“I saw a yellow, crescent moon shape.”
“One of those Swiss wine flasks that are curved.”
“A curved spoon sort of like a banana.”
I tried it a second time with the word “star,” and specifically imagined a five-pointed star. This time, one-fifth of the audience came up with the word or something with the same distinctive shape:
“I saw the image of a starfish rise up into the sky and explode into a shower of stars.
“Starfish shaped with five extensions.”
“A star and cosmos or shooting stars.”
“Star heart clover.”
“A drawing of a star.”
There are over a million words in English, three-quarters of them nouns. If you eliminate the concept nouns or those related to people, you may be left with perhaps 600,000 words. There may not be enough zeros to work out the odds of the answers I was getting being the result of simple coincidence.
The little jar experiment held many more giant implications than whether we could shift pH by a single unit. Human consciousness seems to be like a leaky bucket with our thoughts spilling out of us, getting embedded in everything from other people to our food. Remember that plants are 90 percent water and we are about 70 percent water. If we imprint certain information into water and give it to others to drink, do those thoughts affect them? Do the thoughts we have when we’re preparing our food affect the people who ultimately eat it? How far can we take the tape recording in our lives?
Six of the seven latest water Intention Experiments had worked. We had offered a simple demonstration that our thoughts could change water, and from a distance, even if the changes we’d achieved were small and far less dramatic than the giant effects I’d been witnessing with the water jars in the workshops and teleseminars. But no doubt those tiny changes are remarkable in themselves. Changing the quality of water and making it alkaline by a full unit is more evidence of our enormous capacity as creators.
Even more interesting to me was what didn’t happen during the big experiments.
I’d surveyed the participants in the large water experiments, but nothing significant had changed for them, during or afterward, the way they’d changed during the Peace Experiment. A few had cried from strong emotion and others felt a powerful connection with the other intenders, but any visualizations experienced had mostly to do with petri dishes or, at best, bodies of water around the globe. No one seemed to have undergone the kind of dramatic liftoff experienced by those who took part in the Peace Experiment. The intenders might have felt more connection with the world’s water and more optimistic about the possibility of cleaning up pollution or the environment—many of our readers reported feeling at one with the water, or even experiencing a profound sensation of tasting the wine in the Water into Wine Experiment—but in every other way, nobody’s life changed. Other than feeling a bit peaceful during the experiment, most people felt no long-term change in their mood, and almost no one experienced the type of mystical experiences or major epiphanies that occurred during and after the Peace Experiments. The majority claimed to have felt better on the day and gratified that they’d done something that might ultimately help the planet (“I feel hopeful that this could help with planetary clean-up in general”) but promptly forgot about it. Very few experienced changes in their relationships, or changes in themselves. No one felt a sense of universal love, no one was suddenly hugging strangers, no one felt impelled to pursue a new life purpose. As one veteran from the earlier experiments wrote in, these water experiments had felt very different: “With the Peace Experiment there was a photo with children. Their eyes spoke to me.”
To cause a rebound effect, I was beginning to realize, our experimental targets needed one essential element: other human beings.