Dr. Guy Riekeman, president of Life University, likes stirring things up, a fact he immediately makes clear on the university website’s home page by pronouncing this as a place for “visionaries relentlessly committed to disruptive social innovation.” As he and his fellow faculty members see it, they are setting off a revolution in health care, with their students leading the charge away from the “sickness care” of the conventional medical model to one of holistic wellness. Riekeman and his other chiropractors at Life U are from the camp of chiropractic who believe in vitalism, that all systems of the universe are, as the university puts it, “conscious, self-developing, self-maintaining and self-healing.” The vitalists view their job as simply removing the impediments, in the form of badly positioned spinal vertebrae, blocking the free flow of this energy, like so many fallen branches across a railway line.
A craggy-faced seventy-year-old, Riekeman is a giant in the chiropractic profession who, after taking over the presidency in 2004, grabbed the university by the throat and within a decade transformed a small collection of concrete buildings in a wooded backwater of Marietta, Georgia, into the largest chiropractic college in the world. I sat with Riekeman and a number of other members of the faculty one evening in April 2015, after presenting at Life University, and over a particularly memorable bottle of red wine from his private collection, Guy volunteered the university’s services to study what was going on in my Power of Eight groups, placing the departments of biology and psychology, with all their scientific measuring equipment, at my disposal.
I was overwhelmed by this generosity. This was exactly what I’d been looking for since 2007: a respected university willing to do an experiment on my Power of Eight circles.
To my mind, the most important subject of our study was not discovering whether we could affect a receiver, but examining what was going on inside the senders. Guy put me in touch with Dr Stephanie Sullivan, a neuroscientist and director of the Dr. Sid E. Williams Center for Chiropractic Research, who has a great deal of experience carrying out scientific research. With her assistance, we settled on a simple study of individuals participating in a Power of Eight group made up of volunteers from the student body. I would offer successive Power of Eight groups some simple instruction via Skype or a YouTube video, one of the group members would volunteer as an intention target, and the rest of the group would send intention to him or her, just as I’d done in my workshops. Stephanie and her team would examine the brain patterns of one of the intenders via a qEEG, or quantitative electroencephalogram, the standard equipment for measuring different brain wave patterns, before, during, and after the group intention. All the participants would fill out forms assessing their moods before and afterward so we could assess any changes.
In order for our study to have scientific credibility, Stephanie planned to conduct the trial seven times with a different Power of Eight group made up of different individuals, each of those targeted for brain wave measurements first-timers in this kind of intention. She’d then compare the results of our qEEG readings with those that had been recorded in individuals participating in studies like Andrew Newberg’s and Richard Davidson’s to see if my intention procedure produced any distinct difference. While it wasn’t a fully controlled trial, we would still have a decent preliminary study that might give us certain clues about why participants in my experiments had recorded such life-transforming effects. Later on, we would examine immune system markers and other biological activity in both senders and receivers, to find out if there were any other substantial changes going on.
Stephanie sent through the first results in early February 2016. “So far, the results are quite amazing,” she wrote. Our participants showed evidence of immediate and major global brain changes that were considerably different from normal, she said.
A few months later, after carrying out and analyzing six of the seven studies (one proved unusable), the Life University research team discovered a scientifically significant decrease in activity in the right temporal lobes, the frontal lobes, and the right parietal lobes of our participants during the intention sessions, an almost global quieting of the brain occurring in several frequency (or brain wave) bands. In fact, our results were the opposite of what occurs in general meditation, which tends to cause an increase in alpha and theta brain wave power for the majority of the cortex; alpha waves decreased in our participants. The greatest changes occurred across the entire right parietal lobe of the brain—the part that distinguishes our sense of self from everything that is not self—the temporal lobes, including occipital region, which usually relates to vision—and the frontal regions of the brain, relating to executive processes like planning and decision-making. The temporal lobes are also associated with memory, visual representation, and auditory processing. The fact that our results were statistically significant and consistent across the participants’ studies would suggest that they weren’t due to chance, said Stephanie, particularly as they occurred immediately, during just ten minutes of sending healing intentions, and among people who’d never engaged in a Power of Eight intention circle before.
Chasing enlightenment by engaging in contemplative exercises ultimately is a self-oriented activity, reflected in an increase of activity in the “self” aspects of the brain. “When a person chooses to seek Enlightenment through a specific practice—be it Eastern or Western, religious or secular—activity initially begins to increase in the frontal lobe when she begins to meditate or immerse herself in contemplative reflection,” wrote Newberg. “We also see in our brain-scan studies an initial increase in activity in the parietal lobes. Our awareness of our self in relation to the world or object of meditation is increasing, and parietal activity helps us to identify our goal and move toward it.”
But in our Power of Eight groups and Intention Experiments, moving away from the self and focusing on the “other” immediately reduced activity on many of the areas related to self, particularly those on the right side of the brain, which, aside from creativity, is associated with negative thinking, fear, worry, and depression. Specifically, we found diminished activity in the right prefrontal cortex, which could indicate a shift away from higher stress and anxious states and an improvement in emotion, wrote Stephanie. Indeed, on a Brief Mood Introspection Scale, a standard psychology rating test she gave to the participants of each group before and after the Power of Eight intention circles, significant improvement was noted both for the overall mood score of the participants and also in calm and relaxation. Stephanie gave the participants a standardized scientific test measuring any changes in pain. Although we didn’t observe any significant trends, and our Power of Eight groups were a uniformly healthy group of young students, a number of the members reported pains of various kinds—migraine, joint pain, bad back—and their pain spontaneously disappeared.
The brain waves of our participants resembled the very signatures of many of the groups Andrew Newberg studied who attempt enlightenment, but mainly through a process of surrender—the nuns and monks, mediums, Sufi masters engaged in chanting, and even, to some extent, the Pentecostal Church members speaking in tongues. In instances where the attempt at enlightenment is not a self-oriented activity, as it wasn’t in those instances, and in the case of our Power of Eight groups, the frontal-lobe activity tends to immediately fall away, as the person begins to merge with the object of contemplation. Our Power of Eight study also showed evidence of an increase in coherence between the parietal and frontal lobes. When applied to the brain, “coherence” means the degree of communication between the different parts of the brain. In our case, although activity was diminished, the brains of our participants appeared to be operating as a greater whole. Participants also demonstrated reduced activity in the sensorimotor strip and association areas, the location for sensory and motor processing, the area of the brain that gives meaning to sensations, including music. This would suggest that the Power of Eight members had entered another dimension in which they were far less aware of their immediate surroundings.
This offered more evidence that these changes didn’t have much to do with the Reiki chant music, since the participants experienced a decrease in all the parts of the brain that recognize and process music. And the decrease in the occipital region—related to vision—may relate to the fact that their visual attention was directed internally to a visualization of the person to be healed.
Our group members appeared to be experiencing an altered state of consciousness, just as Newberg’s nuns had done. But the Power of Eight participants weren’t in Holy Communion with God; they were in Holy Communion with each other and the person or situation they were trying to heal. The Life U study suggested that the participants in our global experiments and Power of Eight groups were experiencing something akin to a moment of ecstasy, which then may have proved transformational in their lives. But unlike Newberg’s nuns, monks, or Sufis, the process hadn’t required priming—an hour of intense chanting or reflection to achieve that state—or years of devoted practice. With those subjects, and indeed in most instances of contemplative prayer, says Newberg, “typically it took about fifty to sixty minutes for them to create these same kind of neurological changes.”
Something vastly different had happened to my participants. They’d entered into this state within a few minutes of beginning a Power of Eight group or an Intention Experiment, and their experience of enlightenment was not only immediate but both unexpected and uninvited. And unlike your typical religious or indigenous experiences, there had been no mantras, no fasting, no self-denial or deprivation, no sweat lodge, no yoga or prostrations, no speaking in tongues, no icons, no ayahuasca, no “great effort of the mind,” as Saint Augustine had once described. In fact, there’d been no real effort at all; the experience had been mostly out of their control. They didn’t turn it on—their involvement in the group intention just made it happen. The only initial inducement was the Powering Up—the short mindful meditation ritual we use in all our Intention Experiments. Every person examined in our study was a complete novice who’d never practiced Powering Up before; the most experience they’d had was intermittent meditation, and their only instruction manual had been a thirteen-minute YouTube video I’d made describing how to proceed. In our Intention Experiments and my workshops, the vast majority of our participants also had never practiced my Powering Up before. Although those who took part were mostly experienced meditators, as they recorded in their surveys, for most of them this experience was qualitatively different from ordinary meditation. In every case our participants had been transported into that state in an instant.
There was no other conclusion I could draw. Sending altruistic thoughts of healing in a group was a fast track to the miraculous.
After studying the EEGs of a batch of pairs of guitarists, the psychologist Ulman Lindenberger and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, discovered that when two or more people play music “with one accord,” their brains begin to mimic each other. The brain waves of each pair become highly synchronized and “in phase”—that is, their brain waves begin peaking and troughing at certain key moments. Entire areas of the two brains create synchronized patterns, particularly the frontal and central regions, but also the temporal and parietal regions, those parts of our brains that govern our sense of self in space, and in this instance, the synchrony suggests the guitarists begin to feel a sense of unity with their fellow guitarists.
The same team went on to study guitarists who were improvising together and discovered what’s been called a “hyperbrain pattern”—the tendency of the brains to work in tandem so closely that they come to resemble a single giant brain—particularly when both guitarists are playing at the same time. Other scientists at the University of Lancaster in the United Kingdom and the University “G. d’Annunzio” of Chieti-Pescara in Chieti, Italy, have discovered the same results when studying shared thinking—or what they refer to as Team Mental Models—between groups of jugglers. The juggling pairs develop not only a hyperbrain pattern, but also coordinated heart and breathing rates.
In the case of my Power of Eight groups, this was no longer a collection of separate individuals. The borderline separating them had been erased. This was a supercharged hive, a supergroup. They weren’t just connecting—they were merging.
But the changes experienced by the Power of Eight groups could also be radiating out to their environment. Konstantin Korotkov had perfected a sensitive device he’d playfully christened “Sputnik,” after the first Soviet satellite space launch in 1957. His device was a bit like Roger Nelson’s entire Global Consciousness Project configuration rolled up into a single machine, as Konstantin claimed that it was capable of measuring environmental influences on human emotion.
Sputnik had been developed as a specially designed antenna for his GDVs, which Konstantin liked to refer to as an “integral environment analyzer.” Coupled with the information delivered by his GDV, the purpose of this highly sensitive device was to measure any changes in the atmosphere relative to any changes in the people occupying that space. Konstantin claimed the little sensor could pick up the capacitance, or ability to store charge, of the environment through its extreme sensitivity to changes in environmental electromagnetic fields.
As human emotions are related to the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system, any changes in that system also change blood circulation, perspiration, and other functions, which consequently change the overall electrical conductivity of the body. Aware of the body of evidence demonstrating the effect of solar activity, tectonic disturbances, and tensions, and the ambient electromagnetic field on human health, Konstantin maintained that the reverse was also true: when a person experiences a change of emotion, it will affect the electricity of the environment, which in turn will be picked up by his Sputnik sensor.
“Changes in the functional state of the human body leads to a change in . . . the field distribution around the body, the chemical composition of the ambient air due to exhaled air and emissions of endocrine substances through the skin,” he wrote in a paper about his invention. It was his theory that his Sputnik was capable of picking up even the most subtle of these environmental charges.
Konstantin had spent a number of years testing the device during expeditions to Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Myanmar, Siberia, and elsewhere before becoming satisfied that the device was sufficiently sensitive to assess local environmental conditions and their idiosyncrasies after discovering sensitive sensor signal variations during sunrise and sunset or prior to a thunderstorm. In 2008, he’d taken a series of measurements with it in a variety of spots in Russia—Novosibirsk, Berdsk, Irkutsk, and Abakan—using seven independent Sputnik devices during a total solar eclipse. All seven devices showed similar curves of activity before the eclipse, with all stabilizing similarly after the event was over.
His most intriguing claimed effect was the ability of the device to measure the subliminal psychological and emotional reactions of groups of people. He’d tested this during a variety of group gatherings—religious ceremonies, yoga exercises, group meditation, musical performances, and even public lectures—and discovered statistically significant changes in the device that correlated with the duration of the events and the group’s collective emotion; the higher the changes in his Sputnik signal, the greater the emotional charge of the room. In one study, like Roger Nelson and his REGs, he discovered major changes in the machine’s output during periods of intense meditation. He’d also gone on to demonstrate the effect of subliminal emotion on a room’s charge with one simple study of the impact of low-intensity sound on a group of student volunteers. They’d been asked to come into a classroom and simply work on computers, while unbeknownst to them, Konstantin turned on a device emitting a low-intensity 20 Hz sound—on the border of the human range of hearing but enough to be subliminally disturbing.
After the study was finished, a questionnaire assessing the students’ mental and emotional state, including their perception of their health and mood, unquestionably showed that they’d been stressed during the experiment, and their changes mirrored the changes registered by the Sputnik. The same changes did not occur with a control group of students under the same conditions but without the sound played or even by a third Sputnik, exposed to the same 20 Hz sound but placed in an empty room.
In March 2017, I ran another water experiment with Konstantin in which we asked the audience of one thousand in Miami, Florida, to send intention to a bottle of water connected to a computer installation in his laboratory in St. Petersburg. Even though we were more than five thousand miles away, the measurements clearly showed a significant effect on Sputnik, a major lowering of charge surrounding the water.
During two workshops of mine, when Konstantin was present, he turned on Sputnik and also measured some of the participants before and after our Power of Eight groups. In both cases, stress levels had dropped considerably in the individuals, and a change of charge in the room had clearly been registered. The effects of the Power of Eight groups were affecting the group members but also radiating out, sending out waves of good will.
The same had happened when Roger Nelson turned on his REG machine during our Power of Eight groups in Italy. Roger had been at two conferences with me in Bologna and then in Rome, and in both instances, when I was running the Power of Eight circles, I’d asked him to turn on a REG machine he had in his computer. Each time, the effects grew greater and greater as the groups carried on, some freakishly pronounced movement away from randomness to order.
Sending and receiving, receiving and sending.
My masterclass groups continued to meet together weekly, even after the year was over, miracle vortices of transformation. Teri had a past real-estate client call her out of the blue, saving her financial situation—“from just a step shy of homeless to having a steady stream of income as a real estate broker”; Linda’s Grow Food Earn Money tour got the promotion the Triton group intended, and a major college chose to teach her methods; out of the blue, Melissa’s estranged father sent her a check for ten thousand dollars, and she received another ten-thousand-dollar windfall when a past company she’d worked for briefly bought out her pension; Yoly’s relationship with her husband underwent a major transformation, and he became more supportive of her wish to pursue her entrepreneurial interests rather than simply focusing on her role as a wife and mother; Laureen had invested in DynaCERT, a company involved in reducing diesel and large-engine emissions, and after her group’s intention, the company realized a 558 percent increase in share price and 677 percent increase in market capitalization, and got ranked as the top-performing company in five industries. Besides the major windfalls, there were smaller successes too, and the miracles started showing up with greater frequency after I urged them to stop intending for themselves. Julie established a regular meditative practice, “for the first time in my life”; Nancy began to lose the twelve pounds she’d wanted to shed; Andrea made it through the Christmas holiday without any quarrels with her mother; Judy’s food movement advocacy group got the help she needed; Kristi’s digestive issues disappeared; Marie began attracting new tax clients with no effort; Bev reconciled with her estranged brother; Iris’s chronic congestion began clearing up; Martha’s insomnia completely resolved. Family members, friends, even pets also benefited from the intentions of the groups; Barbara’s husband began working on a new project he hadn’t attempted for years; Laureen’s husband’s condo got sold for the asking price; Elaine’s sister-in-law, who suffered liver failure, ended up not needing a liver transplant, against all expectations, and is recovering and her brother-in-law also managed to avoid planned surgery for a tumor on his esophagus; Karen’s mother’s diabetes is far more controlled and she’s eating regularly for the first time; Melissa’s kitten, born with underdeveloped lungs, is now close to normal; Jane’s horse Calypso was saved multiple times from being put down. Besides having business opportunities show up in unique ways, Marnie made a “huge shift—a feeling that is hard to explain, that really all is well. Satisfied in my life and its course. Real joy and gratefulness.”
Of the 150 regular attenders of the groups, nearly every single one had made some sort of major shift. Many, for the first time, found their life’s purpose or improved their relationships or discovered how they were self-sabotaging. “I take responsibility for my part in interactions and try to remember that I come equipped with a pause button,” wrote Joan Johnson.
My masterclass groups had conducted their own experiments, as I threw out more and more challenges to them. The Proteus group set up their own experiment to increase rainfall in Charlotte and the surrounding area in order to nourish the foliage, with Melissa investigating the monthly rainfall for the year and the deficit from the monthly average. When they started, Charlotte and the surrounding area were suffering from a heavy drought, a yearly deficit of 14.34 inches of rain; after beginning their intention in September, a slow steady rain began to fall. By the second month the area had surpassed the average monthly rainfall, and by December, in three and a half months, the area enjoyed more than 12 inches of rain, largely making up the year’s deficit.
Unbeknownst to Marie’s brother-in-law, who arrived for Christmas with a bad leg ulcer and in excruciating pain, Morpheus decided to put their healing intention into water, which Marie sprinkled into his drinking water. After consuming it, he didn’t have another day of serious pain during the holiday period.
What is it about groups that helps to manifest all these changes so that close to 100 percent of those 150 experienced personal miracles all in the same year? What are the odds against the chance of all this being mere coincidence, the inevitable changes in circumstances that occur over time?
I no longer ask that question. I’m content simply to be a kind of messenger, a reluctant apostle of the mysterious alchemy of groups.
Most of our attendees talk about the invaluable support the group gave them to initiate change in every aspect of their lives. Many cry when they talk about how much the group means to them—“my intention family,” as Ellen Bernfeld referred to her group. The Power of Eight group is there, said Ellen to help her “keep getting back on that horse every time I fall off.”
“Practicing the intentions always takes me to a place of receptivity in myself where my ‘yes, buts’ become quiet,” said Lissa Wheeler. “My mind becomes quiet and the ‘trust’ is more of a knowing on a visceral level that the intention is unfolding. The group connection carries me into this space. Sometimes I would be resistant to settling myself down enough to focus and would sit there almost pouting like a grumpy child, but within five minutes of being willing to stay with the group focus, my brain literally felt like I’d taken a medication that took me into an altered state. It was as if we became one brain together. The group focus felt like a soup that slowly changed my brain.”
“Something about the process of holding intention for others, being randomly connected to a batch of strangers, whom you haven’t had classes or kids together with, is very profound,” adds Mitchell Dean. Like most of the masterclass members, Mitchell has never met his group members, but feels intensely close to them, particularly to Robert Morales, the one member he’s kept up with consistently since the masterclass ended. Mitchell and Robert are in touch almost every day to help each other with all sorts of issues. Mitchell would always email, as he did one night when he was having trouble sleeping, and, in that case, as always, Robert wrote back the following day: “Don’t worry—at 4:30 a.m. I had you covered.” And now when he hears that someone has a problem, Mitchell himself says: “I’ll work on that for you.”
“It’s about the process of giving,” says Mitchell. “I feel better all day when I’m working on others. And it’s not just gratifying to see someone happier—I’m fortunate to get plenty of that in my work as a psychologist. There’s something more there that I don’t understand. My own system, my life, just works better when I’m of service in this way.”
Elaine Ryan, a sixty-one-year-old from Katonah, New York, perhaps put it best: “One evening I saw a visualization of our group Helios as separate pieces, then the pieces started to merge into this nucleus that was growing and becoming unified and one, Helios being the nucleus. So each week we build on the last and become more unified, stronger and more committed to the focus of our intentions.
“I find myself thinking of members in the group or of the group as a unit and a part of my life, more as a unified energy field as well as individuals with their own paths.”
A few years before, in September 2012, I had tried one more major Peace Intention Experiment in the midst of the mudslinging match of that autumn’s presidential election. I’d wanted to do a “Heal America Peace Intention Experiment,” and had targeted what I’d considered the most violent place in America: the US Congress. I’d first played around with it on Coast to Coast AM talk radio show in June and then in a single day’s event over Gaiam web television in September, directing our thousands of viewers to send intention to the two counties surrounding the Capitol building that were suffering ever-growing levels of crime, then sat back and waited an entire year to compare the police figures for twenty-four months before and twelve months afterward.
The following September we analyzed the data: violent crime, the target of our intention, had decreased by 33 percent, starting from the September of our intention, bucking the trend from the two years before, while property crime continued to increase. And the day after our Coast to Coast intention, for the first time since they’d known each other, Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner had hugged his sworn enemy, Democratic former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Did we do that?
Had “we” done any of it?
Short answer: Who cares?
I had more than my usual two sources—the testimonials of thousands of participants, and even a scientific study—to demonstrate that group intention has an extraordinary effect on both the senders and the recipients, but I am no wiser about the “why,” the exact cause of these miracles. Is it the intention itself, the amplified power of prayer in a group, or just the fact of making a public declaration of intent, as Patty Rutledge believed?
Something about the promises we make to each other may carry more weight than the promises we make to ourselves. They give us the courage, like Guy’s vitalists, to remove the branches lying across our tracks with greater ease. A statement in the presence of a small group is a contract we make with the universe—to do and be better than we presently are. There is also the power of support and connection, a condition as necessary to the human spirit as oxygen is to the human body. The most fundamental promise we make to each other, the most basic of our social contracts, is to support each other through adversity. I will be your witness. At every point of our lives we need to know, that somewhere out there, somebody’s got our back, and this knowledge becomes a larger certainty in our lives when a group of strangers connect together to heal us.
I still like evidence in my work, but over the course of studying this phenomenon, I’ve lost my skepticism, my need to tease out some scientific basis for everything that just cannot be rationally explained. Some things in our lives are just beyond our explanation or understanding, and when people come together, miracles just happen, miracles that cannot be reduced to the sum of certain facts and observable data, the workings of the vagus nerve or brain. I’ve come to believe that miracles aren’t individual but the result of collective forces, especially when we move past the puniness of the self. I’ve given up trying to explain magic. It’s enough to show, even in small glimpses, that it’s there.
I’ve witnessed many miracles with this project: evidence that our world and our innate capacity is far greater than that envisioned by Newton or acknowledged by modern scientists. I’ve observed firsthand that consciousness is a collective activity, with the ability to traverse time and space, and that minds connect from any distance when focused on a single point. Connection has nothing to do with proximity and everything to do with the collective capacity to create. All it requires is making a statement homothumadon—with one passionate, ecstatic voice.
I’ve seen the extraordinary power of a small group to create hope and healing in the lives of every group member. I’ve understood that the most powerful transformational state of all is altruism. Moving away from self-help is our most potent healer. I now believe that group intention could indeed heal the world, but not in the way that I first imagined. The target doesn’t really matter. What worked for Mitchell Dean and many others was letting go of any attachment to an outcome. The healing is all in the participation, the desire to pray with one voice.
Intention is the more secular version of prayer, different in its specificity and belief in the individual power to manifest. Rather than leaving it up to God (“Thy will be done”) we recognize the power in ourselves as creators and attempt to take charge of our own fates. We have been raised to think of prayer as highly individualized: you having a private word with your maker. For me it’s now evident that we amplify that private word in every way when we pray as a communal act. As one person requests a healing, so our own need for healing reverberates deeply inside us. We make a public commitment to each other to try harder the following day. Each time we participate in a healing, we also heal one small part of ourselves.
French anthropologist Laurent Denizeau, a teacher at the Catholic University of Lyon who studied healing evenings organized by the International Association of Healing Ministries, once referred to ritual healing groups as “soiree miracles,” suggesting that the coming together of people as a group is a necessary factor in miracle healing. Although the pastor will work up the crowd with his own and others’ healings and invoke the Holy Spirit, in Denizeau’s view, “it is not the act itself which creates healing, but the fact of it being realized in an assembly of prayer.”
En ce sens, la maladie est une épreuve de soi mais aussi une épreuve relationnelle, que ces assemblées prennent en charge. Prendre soin du corps, c’est prendre soin du lien qui le construit comme sujet. Le corps malade, espace de rupture dans la définition de soi (marquée par sa relation aux autres), s’inscrit ici dans un corps plus vaste où la maladie n’est plus l’unique espace commun. Cette sociabilité autour de la guérison agit comme issue de secours du sens.
In that sense, illness is not only a personal trial, but also a test of the relationship of the group itself that those gatherings support. Caring for the body also means caring for the bond that makes it the target of a group. A diseased body, a ruptured space according to the individual’s definition of self, becomes part of a much larger body when viewed in relationship to others, where disease is no longer the only common aspect. When a social connection is part of the healing process, it essentially acts as an emergency safety exit for that small definition of self and gives access to a higher meaning.
Laurent Denizeau is saying is that illness is part of that smallness of the self—a distinct and separate entity—but in the presence of a group, the individual recognizes him or herself as part of a greater whole. The sickness is identified essentially as foreign matter in this perfect unity, like a splinter sticking out of a finger, at which point the group, like a giant tweezer, gently helps it to be excised.
One day when I was listening to the song “One” by U2, I was suddenly struck by the simple wisdom of the words “We get to carry each other.” The song of course focuses on how we are still “one” even if “we’re not the same,” but I realize now that the line about carrying each other doesn’t refer to obligation; it’s about privilege. With the opportunity to carry each other, we are given the opportunity to be healed.
When I think of all of my intention work, I think of what Jesus may have been trying to tell us. No matter whether you are religious or, like me, have a more secular sense of spirituality, his words continue to resonate. Don’t play small when it comes to healing yourself or healing the world. This is too big an enterprise to attempt by yourself. Find your truest self and your greatest power in numbers.