All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.
—BUDDHA
Well? Is it true? Does mind over matter actually happen, or is it a delusional experience of schizophrenic malcontents who find life so boring they must manufacture fantasy properties of this very solid world?
Don’t you want to know if there is any evidence that this is so? Isn’t it a question that everyone really, really wants to know the answer to?1
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1 Sorry, Higgs Particle—you’re outvoted.
W
e know that matter affects mind. Matter over mind. Here’s a simple experiment you can do to prove this:
• Note your mental state.
• Place a large piano, upright or grand, three feet above your foot.
• Release.
• Note your mental state.
In this example, unless you’re Roger Rabbit, Daffy Duck or Wile E. Coyote your mental state is significantly different. Not surprising because matter is the solid, substantial stuff, while mind is the ephemeral, empty stuff. Right?
Scientific Method
The previous exercise was not only a thought experiment you just employed, but also the cornerstone of science—the scientific method. As Dr. Jeffrey Satinover explains:
The scientific method is the most objective human method of investigation ever. It’s absolute; it is not bound to any culture; it is not bound to sex; it is an absolutely powerful tool for the investigation of reality in the hands of anybody who’s willing to use it.
I think the interesting thing about physics is that it is a genuinely new and novel way of trying to come to grips with the world. I think the experimental method, which is important to physics, is a very different business from the method of revelation or the method of meditation.
—David Albert, Ph.D.
There are scientists who are as prejudicial as human beings as anybody else. There is the scientific method, which is specifically a method to minimize the influence of prejudice. That is what science itself is.
—Jeffrey Satinover, M.D.
Simply stated, the scientific method is this: Take a theory, devise an experiment that tests that theory in a way that all extraneous influences are eliminated, run the experiment and, if the theory is contradicted, look for a new theory.
Let’s face it. In this day and age, we look first to science to tell us answers about reality. Mind over matter is a controversial issue in modern science. Another experiment: Ask ten people whether they would like to know if there’s any scientific backing to the concept of mind over matter. (Not to mention the fact that if mind over matter is a reality, then people’s acceptance of that reality makes it infinitely easier to do it.)
Throwing Down the Gauntlet
We’ve been talking about paradigms and the natural resistance to change, but in the end science is run by scientists, who are people. At a recent conference, John Hagelin remarked to the attendees, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking that scientists are scientific.”
Let’s not mince words here. In this area of mind over matter, psychic research and paranormal activities, prejudice in the scientific community runs rampant. It is an affront to the very methodology that they expound.
Why do we care? Because so much that goes on in our world is based on the scientific understanding of the day. And the history of science tells us something great: Once science truly takes something on, its march is relentless, throwing out theories and conjectures until it finds the ones that fit with the experimental evidence.
There’s a whole realm of physics called the hidden sector, which is given to us by superstring theory; it’s a world of its own. It pervades this space; we walk through it; we can even, in principle, see it dimly. This is probably what we call mind. There’s probably thought bodies and thoughts that dwell there like physical creatures dwell here.
—John Hagelin, Ph.D.
Dr. Dean Radin has been running experiments at the Institute of Noetic Sciences for many years and has been at the forefront of the battle to get science to recognize evidence about psychic and mystical phenomenon—essentially, mind over matter:
I tend to push on the evidence. The evidence is a lot stronger than you think, and there is a lot more of it than you think there is. I push it in the same way that I would push any prejudice; in order to fight a prejudice, whether it is racial or gender or some other prejudice, you have to take an affirmative stance.
So I take an aggressive stance just as I do with affirmative action and say there is something to look at, go look at it. . . . Once you start actually paying attention, in this case to evidence, you realize that everything we look at in an evidential sense is filtered through theory. So if your theory is that it can’t exist, then you’re not looking at the evidence in the proper way.
The Experiments
As Dr. Radin points out, there is a lot of evidence for mind over matter. One example is Random Event Generator (REG) experiments that focus on intention. These devices (sometimes called Random Number Generators) are essentially an electronic flip of the coin. They are based on either a single quantum event, like radioactive decay, or a composite of many cascading quantum events, typically “noise” that electronic circuits generate.
Dr. Radin tells about his experience with these experiments:
Back in the 1600s, when Francis Bacon was developing empiricism in science, he . . . mentioned dice as a possibility. Every time a die bounces, you can trace all the way down to quantum events that caused it to turn this way versus that way. So if it bounces a bunch of times, it basically becomes a quantum mechanical uncertainty.
When electronics came around, someone had the idea of simulating the die in electronic circuits. The reason that became useful was because it became very easy to measure precisely what was happening, and you could record it automatically.
In other words, once electronics came into play, you could rely on the machine to record your observations, eliminating human error. The result was not just more accurate observation and recording, but an explosion in REG experiments.
One type of random number experiment that has been conducted hundreds of times over the past four decades or so has been a random generator that only produces sequences of random bits, of zeros and ones, like flipping coins. You simply ask somebody to press a button that produces two hundred bits, but you ask them to try to make it produce more one bits than zero bits.
When you take the entire body of literature, all of the hundreds of experiments that have been done, you can ask a single question: Did it matter that people were trying to push it toward ones or push it toward zeros? And the overall answer is yes, it does matter. Somehow intention is correlated with the operation or the output of the random number generators. If you wish for more ones, somehow the generators produce more ones.
. . . The final analysis is fifty thousand to one. The odds against chance [being the reason the generators went the direction they did, toward intention] are fifty thousand to one.
There has been criticism that his findings “are only statistics.” But the quantum wave function is just the probability of statistically finding a particle at a given place at a given time. So if it is a problem, it’s in good company.
Random Event Generators: Collective Mind
Remember the O.J. Simpson trial? How can we forget—hundreds of millions of people awaiting the fateful guilty/not guilty verdict. For those millions it was high courtroom drama. For Dean Radin, Roger Nelson and Dick Shwope, it was a chance to see if not just intention, but coherent minds could push REGs out of randomness.
What would happen with hundreds of millions of people all had their attention focused suddenly on something? And as it turns out, about a month from the time I had that thought, there was going to be the reading of the O.J. Simpson verdict. This is an unusual point in human history in that people knew far in advance that within a fraction of a second, they were saying the words guilty or not guilty. Something of very high interest would occur which would attract hundreds of millions of people live.
They decided to record the event through random number generators. They set up three in the lab in the United States, one in Amsterdam and one in Princeton. With all five random number generators ready to record the moment the verdict was announced, the scientists waited to see what would happen.
We ran the generators, and afterward we evaluated the results, and sure enough we saw a spike with odds of a thousand to one, actually in two places; one was when the camera switched from outside the courthouse to inside the chambers, which got a huge rise of attention, which was reflected in the random generators; the other was at the moment that the verdict was read. There was this large spike of coherence in all five generators at once.
A spike of coherence refers to a graphical representation of the randomness. Normally the REGs are running 50% 1’s and 50% 0’s. So the graph of 1’s versus 0’s is flat. But for some reason, when millions of people focused on the same thing, that flat graph deviated sharply from 50/50 at precisely the dramatic moment of focus. This contradicts a basic premise of quantum theory—that quantum events are purely random.
Since then, Radin and his colleagues have launched the Global Consciousness Project. In this experiment, REGs around the world run twenty-four hours a day, and every five minutes send the results to a server in Princeton. They have seen significant spikes during events like Y2K, 9/11 and the funeral of Princess Diana. The statistics are mounting, and as Bill Tiller says of his experiments: “The results are robust.”
Intention Imprinting Electron Devices (IIED)
Bill Tiller was the head of his Material Sciences department at Stanford. But decades ago he decided to forego the department head position, government committees and power positions to focus on “this other stuff.” He specifically set out to verify experimentally whether or not human intention affects physical systems. Not “just” collapse a wave function or two, or “just” push a random quantum event around, but affect a macroscopic attribute of matter.
So he constructed an IIED. It is a simple box, with a few diodes, oscillator, E-prom, some resistors and capacitors. Then:
We set it on a tabletop around which four very well qualified meditators, highly inner-self managed individuals sit, and they go into a deep meditative state; they cleanse the environment; they make it essentially a sacred space using their mind and their intentions. And then one of the four speaks the specific intention for this device.
The intention is to influence a particular target experiment. To increase the pH of purified water by one full pH unit, or to decrease the pH by one full pH unit, or to increase the thermodynamic activity of a specific liver enzyme, alkaline phosphatase. Or to influence an in vivo experiment with fruit fly larvae to increase their energy molecule ratio in their body (the ATP to ADP) so they become more fit and have a shorter larval development time. We have used these devices on all four of those experiments and have been robustly successful.2
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2 For a detailed description, see Conscious Acts of Creation, by William Tiller.
In addition to the boxes that have been imprinted, “control” devices (no imprint) are prepared. They are separately wrapped in aluminum foil and shipped to a lab a thousand miles away. Then both types of boxes, control and imprinted, are placed about six inches from the target and turned on. It takes three or four months for these boxes to “condition the space to a higher symmetry state.” In other words, for them to work. The bottom line: “We see marked contrasts within any pair [and within] all of them [collectively]. We see big effects with statistical probabilities better than one part in a thousand.”
Simply put: Dr. Tiller has four meditators focus on a simple electronic box to intend something—like the pH of water changing one full unit. They ship it off, place it next to some water, and a few months later the pH has changed. There is less than a thousand to one chance that this change would have occurred naturally, especially given that the change did not occur with the control units.
How big is one pH unit? Says Tiller: “If the pH in your body changes one full unit, you’re dead.”
As for how this is accepted, Dr. Tiller notes: “Normal scientists have difficulty with it . . . the boggle effect comes in. Their eyes get a little glazed, and they would prefer not to continue the conversation.”
Messages from Water
Dr. Masaru Emoto has made a splash with his book The Hidden Messages in Water. The book features stunning photographs showing frozen water crystals after they have been subjected to non-physical stimuli. He began by subjecting the water crystals to music—from Beethoven to heavy metal—and photographing the results. When the music clearly affected the size and shape of the water crystals, he moved on to consciousness. Music, after all, creates a physical, material object that can affect matter-sound waves. But what about thoughts?
Dr. Emoto put signs on bottles of water that expressed human emotions and ideas. Some of them were positive, such as “Thank You” and “Love.” Others were negative, such as the sign that read “You Make Me Sick, I Will Kill You.” Contrary to the prevailing wisdom of science, the water responded to these expressions of consciousness, even though the words did not create a measurable physical action. The water with the positive messages formed beautiful crystals; the water with the negative messages became ugly and malformed.
The response to these photographs has been worldwide. Between his books, our movie and Emoto’s tireless trips around the globe giving lectures and seminars, there has been a huge public groundswell for more information about his experiments. In response to this, a number of scientific researchers are busy replicating his work. Independent replication is part and parcel of the scientific method.
What unites all of humanity, in fact all of life, is water. Between 70 percent and 90 percent (depending on whose research you read) of our bodies is water. The surface of the planet is mostly water. In a brilliant insight, Dr. Emoto goes right to the heart of the one physical element that life has in common. If life (us) can affect the physical, it seems most natural that it would show up in water.
As is evident from all the above, there is much for the scientific community to consider. Experiments have been run, and more are continually being run. Results are being published. And, meanwhile, most of the world still really wants to know: How real is mind over matter? If thoughts can do that to water, imagine what they can do to us.
Mind Over Matter?
Assuming that mind over matter is a feature of reality, and that we proved, or at least convinced you in our thought experiment with the piano, that matter over mind is also a feature, what does this mean?
Mind over matter over mind over matter over—it’s another tangled hierarchy, another chicken and egg aspect of the universe. But as Ramtha notes, that view is intrinsically dualistic. Dualism pervades these concepts: subject/object, in there/out there, science/spirit, consciousness/reality. That worldview that we’ve been making such a to-do about once more creeps into our language and our thoughts. What about mind as matter and, therefore, matter as mind?
You know everyone talks about mind over matter. But that’s still a dualistic way of seeing reality. What we have learned is that in order to fold time and space and travel to other galaxies, you must see Mind AS Matter.
—Ramtha
How about matter as information or mind as information?
It’s at times like this that the suggestive pull from quantum physics is nearly overwhelming. Does the fact that matter ends up looking like information prove the view: mind as matter? Well, it certainly doesn’t disprove it; in fact, it seems to suggest this view is going in the right direction.
It suggests it like a piano falling on your foot suggests pain. Like observers (conscious or otherwise) affecting the observed, like particles being connected across the universe suggest a non-dual world. They don’t suggest a non-dual world; they prove it. The dream from Newton of a divided universe is over, and in this spirit of positive affirmative action everyone wonders: What are we going to do with that!?
Ponder These for a While . . .
• What prejudices do you have that keep you from shifting to a new paradigm?
• How do those prejudices reflect in the things in your reality (your stuff)?
• What is “your stuff”?
• Is it possible that by knowing that those things are a manifestation of your thoughts, you could easily manifest new things based on your new paradigm?
• List five things that are different between mind and matter.
• Could you look at those things in a different way and see them as the same?
• If thoughts can affect the molecular structure of water, what are your thoughts doing to your reality?
• Which came first—the chair you’re sitting in or the idea of sitting in the chair to read this book?