Rebound effects were also occurring in my Power of Eight groups. Lissa Wheeler joined a Power of Eight group to follow a dream—to write a book that would help bodywork practitioners treat patients with trauma. Lissa was not a natural writer, and by the time she joined the group, she was on her third editor and struggling with major doubts that she could ever make it happen. She was also intimidated by the prospect of marketing the book, promoting herself on social media, and getting shot down by negative reviews.
The first breakthrough came when she and her group began sending intention for Dinah, who needed support to overcome her fear of not having enough money. Dinah had even begun to talk about having to leave her home and pursue work she didn’t want to do just to pay the bills.
Lissa and the other members of the group visualized Dinah receiving all the support she needed to turn her financial circumstances around. One day shortly afterward, Lissa felt a strong urge to go to a particular store, and, once inside, she happened to notice an acquaintance from long ago, who she remembered was a former book publisher. Lissa plucked up the courage to say hello and open up about her struggles with her book project. The friend offered to shepherd her through the entire process, later introducing her to a new editor and to a marketing expert. Lissa then connected with a personal-development coach to help her work through her doubts and break down the project into manageable steps. Ten months later, Lissa published her book, Engaging Resilience, which became a number one Amazon bestseller in two categories after its launch.
“It was like stepping onto a moving escalator of support,” wrote Lissa about the rebound effect of her Power of Eight group’s intention. “We didn’t do that many intentions focused on my book—maybe twice. But the consistency of meeting week after week and visualizing success for whoever we were focused on built up a muscle inside me—a trust in my own possibility.”
Many people in the Power of Eight circles were connecting so closely with their targets that they experienced the same effects. In one workshop in the Middle East, we sent intention to heal the arthritis Mahood was suffering in his right hip. Four of the group suffering pain from arthritis also felt markedly better after sending Mahood intention.
I wanted to test this rebound effect with another large Peace Intention Experiment and in the run-up to September 2011, there was now an obvious target. Like most Americans, I’d been forced to revisit the horror of September 11, 2001, on every anniversary for the past nine years, as every television channel relentlessly replayed the familiar sequence of events: the too-blue cloudless September sky; the first flight crashing into the North Tower, as if a catastrophic mistake; the ramming of the second plane into the South Tower seventeen minutes later, confirming there was no mistake about it; the bodies cascading out of one-hundred-story windows; the slow-motion concertina of the two towers within a half hour of each other into a cloud of fulminating black dust. It had been the we-will-never-forget imagery that America believed necessary to cling to in order to properly commemorate the dead, but with the tenth anniversary looming that summer, I grew determined to offer up an alternative.
The idea for a 9/11 Peace Intention Experiment was sparked by a chance meeting, after I’d agreed to make time to meet a friend of a friend at the Miraval retreat in Tucson, Arizona, where I was staying for a conference. Tadzik Greenberg, a genial dreadlocked fellow in his early thirties, loped over to introduce himself in the reception area. As the founder of Planet Coexist, he informed me, he’d called the meeting to discuss the ambitious plans he and his friends had for marking the tenth anniversary with a giant festival in Seattle called One: The Event, which would hold three days of global activities hoping to transform a day of fear into one of love, forgiveness, and unity. One: The Event had been planning a host of activities, speakers, and live music in Seattle at the University of Washington and the Seattle Memorial Stadium, which would also be broadcast around the world via an international webcast through scores of other peace organizations. The plan was to “shift the tides of fear and anger into love and harmony,” according to the event organizer, Laura Fox, in the official press release and also to “explore what is broken in our current systems” and “what can each of us do to take action to bring our visionary solutions into the world.”
Tadzik had heard about the Intention Experiment and was hoping to have the event culminate in some sort of global peace experiment. Was I interested? I stared at Tadzik’s get-up, a hodgepodge of loose-fitting, patchwork garments and ancient sandals. I was highly dubious that he and his colleagues could pull off such a vast and complex event, until he rattled off an array of well-known and highly respectable transformational and activist organizations with whom One: The Event had already agreed to partner: the Shift Network, the Pachamama Alliance, Four.Years.Go., the Agape church, and many others. As the morning wore on, he began to win me over—and with good reason. Over the next few months, Tadzik would prove to be an extraordinary networker.
I spent days mulling over the kind of Intention Experiment that might best mark the date in some sort of positive way, and suddenly thought of Dr. Salah Al-Rashed. A Kuwaiti from a prominent Arab family, Salah had single-handedly pioneered the human potential movement in the Arab world. He’d been educated in the United Kingdom and the United States, and after receiving his doctorate in psychology at Eastern Michigan University, he’d returned home to set up a center and share what he’d learned from the West, offering workshops and training programs on self-development and spirituality. Salah was also a well-known peace activist, calling for peace in places like Palestine at a time when others in prominent positions like his demanded reprisal and continued conflict. In 2010, he’d started the Salam (Peace) Group, which presently had thousands of members and groups in forty Arab cities throughout the Gulf, from Gaza and Cairo to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, each group meeting every week either in person or on the internet to send prayers for peace. Salah’s own books, including a novel about enlightenment, have been massive bestsellers throughout the Gulf States. After launching his own television and radio shows, it became virtually impossible for Salah, an uncharacteristically tall and imposing bearded figure, his black hair scraped back in a short ponytail, to go anywhere in Kuwait without someone asking for his autograph. He is, for all intents and purposes, the Deepak Chopra of the Middle East, and, of all people, he would be able to drum up huge Arab participation in the experiment.
I’d met him in 2009, after he’d attended one of my workshops, when he and his wife, Sarah, who runs the center, had visited my company’s London office to ask if they could host me in Kuwait the following year. We’d been impressed by the handsome couple and agreed, my husband planning to accompany me.
As it happened, Bryan couldn’t spare the time off, so I had to travel alone. When I arrived at the Kuwait City airport the following February, I was momentarily panicked, frantically scanning the heavy crowd of Arab men in traditional dress for Salah, his wife, or someone holding a sign with my name on it. Finally I heard my name being called out, but the voice belonged to someone I didn’t recognize. When Salah and Sarah had come to our office, they’d been dressed in Western gear, but the person calling for me was outfitted in traditional thwab and red-checked keffiyeh head scarf, and the woman by his side was covered head to toe in black with full hijab and niqab, her eyes the only clue to who she was.
When we got to the hotel, Salah showed me the room where I’d be speaking the following day and ran through a few cultural pointers. “The men will sit on one side and the women on the other,” he said. “Don’t reach out to shake a man’s hand. When you do your experiential exercises, make sure to segregate men and women, and don’t ask them to touch a member of the opposite sex in any way. Leave time at eleven a.m. for them to pray.”
When I walked onto the stage the following day with my translator, a young woman from Syria, covered up in what appeared to be a gray-zipped coat and a tightly wrapped head scarf, we were met by a sea of black on the right side where the women had chosen to sit, naturally segregated, and white and red, where the men were sitting, on the left. The attendees of both sexes were well educated—with many doctors, lawyers, and other professionals among them—and they’d come from every nation in the Gulf, from Saudi Arabia to Palestine.
I looked out at the audience—intelligent, polite, expectant—and thought about what I was about to teach them: the power of thoughts to affect their reality. This is going to be interesting.
But as the first day wore on, I was overwhelmed by their enthusiastic embracing of these modern ideas about the new science and the power of intention, which they felt meshed perfectly with their religion, aspects of which were present in some form during virtually every conversation. During the midmorning breaks, the men headed to the corner of the room, got on all fours, positioned themselves in a direction so that they were facing Mecca, and leaned forward to pray. Afterward they quietly resumed their seats, even those from the most conservative countries like Saudi Arabia, happy to engage in my distinctly Western New Age ideas.
My audience was highly inquisitive, but over the two days, I became the biggest student in the room: Why do you pray at 11 a.m.? Why do you cover up? What are you wearing underneath that black cloak? (Answer: Gucci.) Does covering up lower the incidence of rape? What do you think about not being allowed to drive? How would you solve the Arab-Israeli conflict? The outpouring of love from all of them in response to my curiosity was extraordinary, a gratitude for the attempt at being understood. In the end, I had to buy a suitcase to hold all the presents they showered me with: framed photographs of one attendee with her arm slung around me; elaborate silver and turquoise jewelry; models of traditional ships of Kuwait, which used to be a major port; religious artifacts, including souvenirs from the Kaaba, located in the middle of Mecca, the holiest site in all of Islam.
Salah went on to host a few more of my workshops in Dubai and Turkey, and I’d loved the audience every time I’d gone. His followers were the perfect group to provide my Western audience with a counterpoint to al-Qaeda.
Over the summer, he and I fleshed out our plan to call for a new Twin Towers of East and West in communion and solidarity for peace. It was Salah’s idea to open the event by apologizing on behalf of all Arabs, but I told him the West needed to apologize as well. However justified America felt in invading Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, the fact remained that the Afghans had lost far more than we had. Most Westerners did not acknowledge that some one hundred thousand innocent Afghan people had been killed, injured, detained, or deported because of a war set off by a small group of Arab radicals, who were terrorizing them as well. Peacemakers such as my friend James O’Dea, former head of the Washington bureau of Amnesty International, who’d witnessed public trials in such war-torn areas as Rwanda, convinced me that one of the fastest routes to restoring accord is frank and public apology for past wrongdoing.
When we started to plan our 9/11 Peace Intention Experiment, I was careful to use a design that was identical to that of the 2008 Peace Intention Experiment. We would repeat our intention every day for eight days, as we had in 2008, and keep the main members of our original scientific team: Gary, Roger, Jessica Utts.
Salah and I were of one mind about the target: it had to be Afghanistan. By the time of our experiment, the war had been raging on for almost ten years. The Helmand and Kandahar provinces of Afghanistan, the two large provinces in the south and the major strongholds of the Taliban, had incurred the highest number of war- and terrorist-related injuries and deaths among both military and civilians of any province in the country. Both areas had been the sites of recent car bombings and suicide bombers, and, as the largest opium market in the world, this area of Afghanistan, which borders on Pakistan, was also the target of terrorist attacks from outsiders. Those involved in fighting the NATO forces’ “War on Terror” were a mix of Taliban fighters and warring tribal groups involved in the opium trade. After the 2010 peace initiative attempted by the then Afghan government with the Taliban broke down, and after NATO had initiated new offensives as a consequence, the violence had intensified.
Copperstrings designed a web platform that was virtually identical to the one we had used for our Peace Intention Experiment in 2008, but with two differences: we’d have two sets of the same web pages, one in English and the other in Arabic, and we’d rent an even larger server power, as a double insurance against our site crashing. Since One: The Event intended to broadcast the entire three-day event over the internet, Tadzik put us in touch with a woman who had just started up an internet TV station and who offered to do a daily livestream of Salah and me after each day’s experiment by hooking our broadcast into the webcast of the event.
For the broadcast, Salah started out with an unabashed apology on behalf of all Arabs for not being more vigilant and for allowing the attacks to happen, and I returned the apology for the West’s “aggressive and violent response to 9/11” and offered a pledge “to work to avoid violence and political and economic exploitation by offering an alternative to war and to Western economic and political supremacy at any cost.” Both of us also promised to “work for greater tolerance of differences of all faiths and creeds.”
When it was time for the intention to begin, the web pages flipped over again, this time to reveal an image of an Afghan boy surrounded by white doves and an image of Caucasian and Arabic hands clasped—a symbol of the East and West coming together.
This time our 9/11 Peace Intention Experiment attracted participants from seventy-five countries, from Iceland to Brazil to California to Indonesia, and also every Arab country on the planet. People participated in all sorts of ingenious ways: via the giant screen at One: The Event, from a mountaintop, during a Native American peace pipe ceremony. One participant who was driving during the time of the experiment pulled over each day to participate. “I could always feel an energy shift about ten minutes past the hour when the experiment began,” he said. In the end, many thousands participated from One: The Event and the simultaneous broadcasts, with seven thousand more signed up on our website and tens of thousands tuning in to my daily webcast. This was undoubtedly the biggest mind-over-matter experiment in history.
On the third day of the Peace Intention Experiment I was encouraged after discovering that the United States had endorsed plans for a Qatar-based office, located in Doha, for the Taliban to begin proposed peace talks with the West. But after the experiment ended on September 18, once again we had to embark on a patient three-and-a-half-month wait, to allow events to unfold over the rest of 2011 so that we could determine whether our intention had any effects, while I had to find somebody inside the American military willing to disclose the true figures to me.
No official in an American conflict wants to talk about the bodies. I spent several months hounding officials inside virtually every large agency involved in the War on Terror: the US State Department; UNAMA (the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan), which tallied civilian casualties; the Afghanistan government; the combined-forces mission inside Afghanistan and various departments inside NATO, which ultimately referred me to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a NATO-led mission set up by the UN Security Council initially to train the Afghan Forces, but whose powers had grown to leading the combat operations in the regions.
Most of the agencies would not release all of their figures—ISAF claimed to have no tabulated information they were prepared to make public about military casualties, but they had plenty of data about the enemy’s attacks and civilian casualties. UNAMA had monthly data about individual sections of the country for 2009 and 2010—but not for 2011.
After making a nuisance of myself with the ISAF, I was finally put through to its official spokesman, a German general named Carsten Jacobson, who was a bit more helpful although cagey about releasing any data. He warned me that any statistics on military fatalities aren’t completely reliable, because once a soldier is wounded, he usually is transferred back to his home country, and NATO’s combined army usually doesn’t get any further feedback about whether he has lived or died. Largely to get rid of me, he eventually sent me an official report from NATO’s Afghan Mission Network Combined Information Data Network Exchange database, about the war’s progress over several years as of January 13, 2012, and I was also finally able to get hold of UNAMA’s 2011 annual report concerning civilian casualties. Both sets of figures may have represented a sanitized version of casualties, but as I was using them for the whole of my comparison, at least they’d be consistent.
Both reports had largely done the work for us: a comparison of casualties among military and civilians as well as various kinds of enemy attacks with those of prior years, and a complex analysis of trends in various kinds of violence, so that we did not need a professor of statistics to produce the final numbers. The statistics in the reports included the numbers of enemy-initiated attacks in different sections of Afghanistan, including the south, the target of our intention, and also the number of improvised explosive devices used, including mine strikes, the principal means by which Afghan insurgents execute strikes against the NATO military and the cause of more than 60 percent of civilian casualties, according to ISAF. From all these figures, we could analyze what happened in September 2011 and the two months afterward as compared to what had happened in the months and years prior to our experiment.
Once again, we were amazed by the huge drop in the casualty rate that occurred among civilians and the military after the 9/11 Peace Intention Experiment, specifically in our two provinces. For civilian casualties, according to the NATO statistics, 440 civilians were killed in August 2011, but the monthly numbers fell to 340 in September and continued falling over October (290) and November (201), representing a 22 percent, 14 percent, and 30 percent drop over the months before, respectively. All three figures were well below the average death rate (374) that had occurred the 28 months prior, with October 2011 23 percent lower than average and November 46 percent lower than average. In fact, November 2011 represented the second-largest percentage decrease of civilian casualties since the beginning of 2009. Overall, between September and November 2011, civilian casualties fell by an average of 37 percent, compared with the casualty rate in August 2011.
In terms of enemy attacks, NATO figures show that attacks with explosive devices fell by 19 percent, remained at the same figure in October, and continued to fall another 9 percent in November and 21 percent more in December. This final figure was 16 percent lower than the average attack rate from September 2009 to December 2011, the two-plus years before.
Perhaps the most interesting downward trend had to do with overall initiated attacks by the Taliban. The monthly figures for 2010 had showed a steady upward trend of attacks (up 80 percent overall in 2010), but then this trend flattened out and hardly changed until the beginning of 2011, when attacks began climbing relentlessly upward until August. After our experiment in September, the numbers began a steep downward trend, falling drastically from October to December 2011, and overall enemy-initiated attacks over the last three months of 2011 were 12 percent lower compared to the same period in 2010. As the report noted about the second half of the year: “This is the longest sustained downward trend in enemy-initiated attacks recorded by ISAF.”
In fact, compared with the rest of the country, the southwest—the target of our intention—recorded the largest decrease in figures compared to the September of the year before, an extraordinary 790 percent decrease over the month before and a 29 percent decrease for the entire year compared to 2010. This trend carried in October (the attack rate was 500 percent lower), November (400 percent lower), and December (300 percent lower).
What made our results even more compelling was the fact that the big decreases in violence that had occurred in our target provinces of Helmand and Kandahar had not been uniformly experienced around the country. The overall figures of casualties for the entire country bounced upward in December 2011 after two suicide attacks during the Ashura celebrations in Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif, and Taliban-initiated attacks increased by 19 percent in the East from 2010 to 2011.
But, once again, what did this all mean? As with 2008, nothing definitive. You construct a hypothesis, and when it pans out, you have to test it again. You test it again, it pans out, and you have to try it a few more times. Only after results are replicated four, five, six times can you show a pattern that starts to get interesting. And, once again, there were a million and one circumstances that could have accounted for the decreases in violence. For one thing, there was the fact that the United States and NATO had already begun to wind down the Afghan war, although that did not explain the concentrated lowering of violence in our two regions. Despite many potential variables, the results did seem compelling, particularly considering that we had quantified our intention request—as we had in our 2008 Peace Intention Experiment for Sri Lanka—asking that violence be lowered by at least 10 percent. When we looked at the data for the whole of the country, it consistently showed average decreases in casualty rates somewhere around the 10 percent mark.
Besides a straightforward analysis of casualties, I’d also asked Roger Nelson to see if there was a demonstration of any effect on the Global Consciousness Projects’ network of random event generators during the eight days of our collective intention, just as he had done for our 2008 experiment. Nelson linked together the eight days of data to make a sequence that included all the machines’ output during all the twenty-minute time periods of the eight days, paying particular attention to each day’s ten-minute windows of actual intention. After the third day, he found a very steady trend—a general tendency for the outputs that accumulate during each second of the time period we were looking at to be similar.
“Most of the deviations are negative,” he wrote me, which meant that the mean was less than the expected one hundred, like tossing a coin and having it constantly come up tails. When Roger strung together the deviations, the graph line showed a continuous downward direction. “A persistent or ‘steady’ trend reflects consistency,” he wrote me, “and that in turn suggests an effect that isn’t just chance.”
Roger cautioned me that the effect size was very small compared to inherent “noise”—or chance data. “Deviations which appear in our graphic displays are a combination of possible effects and ordinary random fluctuation,” he wrote me. One single experiment like this one cannot be reliably interpreted on its own.
But when he compared his results with those of the 2008 Peace Intention Experiment, he discovered a virtually identical negative trend in the cumulative deviation graph. “This similarity across the two experiments helps support an interpretation of the negative deviations shown in the current data set as an effect linked to the Intention,” he wrote me.
Something definitely seemed to be happening there, as it had with our original Sri Lankan Peace Experiment, but something else was happening that I began to notice on Facebook, Instant Messenger, and the two surveys I’d conducted of the participants about their experience, one in English and the other in Arabic. We appeared to be ending the war in another way.