Chapter 12
The Intention Experiment
Seeing Acetabularia for the first time takes your breath away. The mesmerizing appearance of this common algae of the Caribbean and the Mediterranean has earned a number of poetic nicknames—“mermaid’s wineglass,” or “sombrerillos” in Spanish—and both are fitting. Its slender stem supports a tiny cupped sombrero, like a miniature green umbrella ready to be popped into an underwater tropical cocktail.
For more than seventy years, biology students have marveled over this tiny plant, not simply for its appearance but for a single bizarre fact of its existence. Acetabularia is a freak of nature. From stem to sombrero, the entire plant, measuring up to two inches, consists of a single cell. Because of this, Acetabularia, unlike most living things, can be counted on to behave predictably. The large nucleus of the cell always sits at the rhizoid, the base of the stalk, and divides only when the plant has reached its full height. This uncomplicated structure has helped to unmask biology’s greatest mystery: which portion of the plant engineers its ability to reproduce. In the 1930s, the German scientist Joachim Hammerling elected Acetabularia as his perfect “tool organism” to work out the role of a nucleus in plant genetics.
The simplicity of this single-celled organism with its single giant nucleus not only offered up the secrets of the cell in bold relief; it divulged the whole of the building plans of plant life. Working with Acetabularia allowed one to sit in stunned witness to the complex morphology of life within the totality of a single cell, large enough to be visible to the naked eye.
Acetabularia also represented a model organism for my first intention experiment. Fritz Popp, who was to perform the experiment with me, believed that if we were going to attempt to carry out my proposal, we needed to begin on the ground floor. For this first experiment, I planned to assemble a small group of volunteers in London, and ask them to use their intention to affect an organism in Popp’s lab in Germany. Using Acetabularia for our test subject would be analogous to testing a car made of a single moving part. It removes all the variables of a living thing, with an unfathomable number of chemical and energetic processes occurring at every instant.
Humans, for instance, are like a manufacturing plant covering most of the United States. A septillion chemical reactions occur every second in every tablespoon of our cells, tiny explosions that get multiplied by the 50 trillion cells of the average human body. In an experiment comparing, say, the growth rates of two sections of the body, it is almost impossible to control for every variable. Growth rates can be altered by food, water, genetics, mood, or even a sudden dip in air temperature.
During our first intention experiment, Popp intended to examine the alteration in the tiny light being emitted from the algae, which was infinitely more subtle than cellular growth rate. Nonetheless, in multicellular living things, even the light that emanates from each cell is subject to a host of influences: the health of the host, the weather, and even the activity of the sun.1 Light can also differ from cell to cell.
With Acetabularia, as the light reassuringly derives from its single nucleus, so it is subject to far less fluctuation. With such a primitive organism, Popp explained, it would be possible to demonstrate, with a fair degree of certainty, that any effect, for better or worse, was entirely the result of our remote influence. Only by using such a simple system could we show that our effect was indisputably due to intention and not a dozen other possibilities.
Generally speaking, an increase of photons indicates that a life-form is being stressed, and a decrease indicates that its health has improved. If I sent an intention to make the algae healthier, and the photon count went down, it would be likely to mean that I was having a good effect. If the photon count went up, it was probable that I was, in some way, harming the algae. Popp has a number of extremely sensitive photocount detectors at his disposal, which can register an intensity of visible light of about 10–17 watts per square centimeter, analogous to the light coming from a candle several miles away.2 This type of ultrasensitive equipment would enable us to record every single hair’s breadth of difference—even by a single photon—and so determine the extent of our influence.
Popp had reason to be cautious. For 30 years he had faced enormous opposition to his bold assertion that light emanates from living things,3 and had finally won respect from the physics community. He had set up his international community of like-minded scientists from prestigious centers all over the globe to work on biophoton emissions.4 By participating in our experiment, he might risk this hard-won reputation and goodwill. After all, ultimately I was asking this world-renowned physicist to test whether collective positive thinking could change the physical world.
The results of a number of experiments had suggested that a “group” consciousness might possibly exist. In their random-event generator experiments, PEAR’s Jahn and Dunne found that the influence of pairs of the opposite sex who knew each other had a powerful complementary effect on the machines—roughly three and a half times that of individuals. Two intensively involved people appeared to create six times the “order” on a random machine. Some couples even produced a “signature” result, which did not resemble the effects they generated individually.5
There was also evidence that a group all intently focused on the same thought registered as a large effect on an REG machine. Roger Nelson, the chief coordinator of the PEAR lab, had come up with the idea of running REG machines continuously during a particularly engaging event, to examine whether the focused attention of a group had any effect on the random output of the machines.
He and Dean Radin developed what they termed “FieldREG” devices and ran them during a host of events involving the highly focused attention of an audience: intense or euphoric group workshops; religious group rituals; Wagnerian festivals; theatrical presentations; even the Academy Awards. In most instances, their studies showed that multiple minds holding the same intensely felt thought created some kind of deviation from the norm on the equipment.6
Nelson had been fascinated by the possibility of a global collective consciousness. In 1997, he decided to place REGs all over the world, have them run continuously, and compare their output with moments of global events with the greatest emotional impact. For his program, which became known as the Global Consciousness Project, Nelson organized a centralized computer program, so that REGs located in fifty places around the globe could pour their continuous stream of random bits of data into one vast central hub through the Internet. Periodically, Nelson and his colleagues, including Dean Radin, studied these outpourings and compared them with the biggest breaking news stories, attempting to find any sort of statistical connection. Standardized methods and analysis revealed any demonstration of order—a moment when the machine output displayed less randomness than usual—and whether the time that it had been generated corresponded with that of a major world event.
By 2006, they had studied 205 top news events, including the death of the Princess of Wales, the millennium celebrations, the deaths of John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife, and Clinton’s impeachment. When Nelson analyzed four years’ worth of data, a pattern emerged. When people reacted with great joy or horror to a major event, the machines seemed to react as well. Furthermore, the degree of “order” in the machines’ output seemed to match the emotional intensity of the events, particularly those that had been tragic: the greater the horror, the greater the order.7
This trend appeared most notable during the events of 9/11. After the twin towers were destroyed, Nelson, Radin, and several colleagues studied the data that had poured in from 37 REGs around the world. Individual statistical analyses were performed by Radin, Nelson, computer scientist Richard Shoup of Boundary Institute, and Bryan J. Williams, a psychology undergraduate at the University of New Mexico. According to the results of all four analyses, the effect on the machines during the plane crashes was unprecedented. Out of any moment in 2001, the greatest variance in the machines away from randomness took place that day. The results also represented the largest daily average correlation in output between machines than at any other time in the history of the project.8 According to the REGs, the world’s mind had reacted with a coherent global horror. Nelson and three independent analysts took apart the data using a variety of statistical methods. Nelson examined his results through the chi-square distribution method, that statistical technique which plots the square of each of the machine’s runs, so that any deviation from chance easily shows up. All the analysts concluded that an enormous increase in “order” occurred during time frames relating to key moments in the drama (such as shortly before the first tower was struck), which were likely to be the most intense periods of horror and disbelief.9 As REGs are designed to control for electrical disturbances, natural electromagnetic fields, or increased levels of mobile phone use, the two scientists were able to discard all those possibilities as potential causes.10
Furthermore, although activity of the REGs was normal in the days leading up to 9/11, the machines became increasingly correlated a few hours before the first tower was hit, as though there had been a mass premonition. This similarity in output continued for two days after the first strike. Williams thought of it as a kind of psychic signature, a giant unconscious psychokinetic effect created by 6 billion minds set to react in unified horror.11 The world had felt a collective shudder several hours before the first plane crash, and every REG machine had heard and duly recorded it.
Although not every analyst agreed with these conclusions,12 Nelson, Radin, and several of their colleagues eventually were able to publish a summary of their findings in the prestigious physics journal Foundations of Physics Letters. 13
Nelson went on to study other events in the wake of 9/11, including the start of the Iraqi war. He compared REG activity with variations in the approval polls of President George W. Bush, to see if he could discover a connection of any kind between the global “mind” and current American opinions of the president, and whether the REG network reacted most when there were strong feelings of unity and purpose, such as the Americans had shared in the wake of 9/11, or when the public mood was polarized, as it had been after the invasion of Iraq and the deposing of Saddam Hussein’s regime. After examining 556 separate polls between 1998 and 2004, his colleague Peter Bancel discovered that peaks in variations followed big public changes of opinion of any variety, either for or against the president. Strong emotion, positive or negative—even to presidential decisions—seemed to produce order.
The results of the FieldREG work and the Global Consciousness Project offer several important clues about the nature of group intention. A group mind appears to have a psychokinetic effect on any random micro-physical process, even when not focused on the machinery itself. The energy from a collective, intensely felt thought appears to be infectious. There also appears to be a “dose” effect; the effect on REG of a load of people thinking the same thought is larger than the effect of a single person. Finally, emotional content or degree of focus is important. The thought has to engulf a group of people in a moment of peak attention, so that every member of the group is thinking the same thought at the same time. A catastrophe is certainly an effective way to snap the mind to attention.
The data from the Global Consciousness Project had one serious limitation. However accurately Nelson had taken the temperature of the world mind, his data simply referred to the effect of mass attention. There had been no intention to cause change. What would happen if a number of people were not simply attending to something but also trying to affect it in some way? If the focused attention of a group has a physical impact on sensitive equipment, does the signal get stronger when the group is actually trying to change something?
The only systematic study of group intention concerns the so-called Maharishi Effect of Transcendental Meditation (TM), the technique first introduced by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to the West in the 1960s. Over several decades, the TM organization has carried out more than 500 studies of group meditation, with or without intention, to examine whether meditation has a resonance effect on reducing conflict and suffering.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi postulated that regularly practicing TM enabled one to get in touch with a quantum energy field that connects all things. When a group of meditators was large enough, he claimed, their collective meditations caused “Super Radiance,” a term in physics used to describe the coherence of laser light. During TM, the theory went, the minds of meditators all become tuned to the same frequency, and this coherent frequency begins to order the disordered frequencies around it. Resolution of individual internal conflict leads to resolution of global conflict.
The TM studies claimed to demonstrate effects from two types of meditation. The first was undirected, the simple consequence of a certain percentage of the population meditating. The second resulted from deliberate intention, and required experience and focus; advanced meditators would target a particular area and direct their meditation to help resolve conflict and lower the rate of violence.
The Maharishi’s theory rests entirely on the premise that meditation has a threshold effect. If 1 percent of the population of a particular area practices TM, he claims, or the square root of 1 percent of the population practices TM-Sidhi, a more advanced type of meditation, conflict of any variety—the rate of murders, crime, drug abuse, even traffic accidents—goes down.
Twenty-two studies have tested the positive impact of the Maharishi Effect on crime levels. One study of 24 U.S. cities showed that whenever a city reached a point where 1 percent of the population was carrying out regular TM, the crime rate dropped to 24 percent. In a follow-up study of 48 cities, those 24 cities with the requisite threshold percentages of meditators (1 percent of the population) experienced a 22 percent decrease in crime, and an 89 percent reduction in the crime trend. In the other 24 cities without the threshold percentage of meditators, crime increased by 2 percent and the crime trend by 53 percent.14
In 1993, the TM’s National Demonstration Project focused on Washington, D.C. during a large upsurge of local violent crime in the first five months of the year. Whenever the local Super Radiance group reached the threshold number of 4,000, the rate of violent crime fell and continued to fall, until the end of the experiment. The study was able to demonstrate that the effect had not been due to any other factors, such as police efforts or a special anticrime campaign. After the group disbanded, the crime rate in the capital rose again.15
The TM organization has also targeted global conflict. In 1983 a special TM assembly met in Israel to send intentions through meditation to resolve the Palestinian conflict. During their sessions, they made daily comparisons between the number of meditators working on the project and the state of Arab–Israeli relations. On days with a high number of meditators, fatalities in Lebanon fell by 76 percent. Their reach apparently extended beyond armed conflict; ordinary violence—local crime, traffic accidents, and fires—also all decreased. When analyzing their results, the TM group claimed to have controlled for confounding influences such as weather.16
TM adepts have also sought to influence the “misery index”—the sum of inflation and unemployment rates—in the United States and Canada. And indeed, during one concerted effort between 1979 and 1988, the U.S. index fell by 40 percent and the Canadian index by 30 percent.
Another group of adepts sought to influence the monetary growth and crude-materials price indexes as well as the American misery index. In this instance, the misery index fell by 36 percent, and the crude-materials price index fell by 13 percent. Although the growth rate of the monetary base was affected, it was only by a small margin.17
Critics of TM have argued that these effects could easily have been due to other factors—a reduction in the population of young men, say, or better educational programs in these areas, or even the ebb and flow of the economy—although the TM organization claims to control for such changes.
The problem with these studies, to my mind, is the controversy surrounding the TM organization itself; rumors now abound about data fixing and the infiltration by Maharishi’s followers into many scientific organizations. Nevertheless, the TM evidence is so abundant and the studies are so thorough that it is difficult to dismiss them completely. Furthermore, the studies are regularly published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and so must meet some level of scientific rigor and critical scrutiny. The sheer bulk of the research argues compellingly that a force outside the understanding of orthodox science might be at work.
But even if the results are legitimate, the TM studies, like the REG data, mostly concern group attention. In many instances, the meditators are not people who maintain a focused intention to change something else.
For three months in the first quarter of 1998, forest fires raged out of control in the Amazonian state of Roraima, 1,500 miles northwest of Brasília, devastating the rain forest. It had not rained for months—an effect blamed on El Niño—and the ordinarily humid rain forest was bone-dry, perfect kindling for the fire that had by that time scorched 15 percent of the state. The rains, usually so copious in this part of Brazil, remained elusive. The UN termed the fire a disaster without precedent on the planet. Water-carrying helicopters and some 1,500 firefighters, including recruits from neighboring Venezuela and Argentina, fought the flames to no avail.
In late March, the weather-modification experts were called in: two Caiapo Indian shamans especially flown to the Yanomami reservation, housing the last of what are believed to be Stone Age tribes. They danced around a bit and prayed, and gathered up a few leaves. Two days later, the heavens opened and it began to pour. Up to 90 percent of the fire was extinguished.18
The Western equivalent of a rain dance is to hope for good weather, and when carried out as a group intention, it may be just as effective. PEAR’s Roger Nelson carried out an ingenious little study, after realizing that the sun had shone on graduation day at Princeton for as long as he could remember. Had the desire of the community for a sunny commencement day had a powerful local effect?
He had gathered weather reports for the past thirty years in Princeton and the surrounding areas for the times around graduation day and statistically compared them; Princeton was drier than usual for that time of year, and drier and sunnier than surrounding communities for just that day. If the figures were to be believed, the collective wish for good weather by the community of Princeton may have created some sort of mental umbrella that stretched only to their borders during that single day.19
The only other evidence of group mind had been a provocative little double-blind exercise carried out by Dean Radin, who was interested in the claims of Japanese alternative medicine practitioner Masaru Emoto that the structure of water crystals is affected by positive and negative emotions.20 Emoto claims to have carried out hundreds of tests showing that even a single word of positive intent or negative intent profoundly changes the water’s internal organization. The water subjected to the positive intent supposedly develops a beautiful, highly complex crystalline structure when frozen, whereas the structure of water exposed to negative emotions became random, disordered, even grotesque. The most positive results supposedly occur with feelings of love or gratitude.
Radin placed two vials of water in a shielded room in his laboratory at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California. Meanwhile, a group of 2,000 attendees at one of Emoto’s conferences in Japan was shown a photo of the vials and asked to send them a prayer of gratitude. Radin then froze the water in those vials as well as samples of control water from the same source that had not been exposed to the prayers, and showed the resulting crystals to a panel of independent volunteers. He’d carefully blinded the study so that neither he nor his volunteers had any idea which crystals had been grown from the water samples that had been sent intention. A statistically significant number of the volunteer judges concluded that water sent the positive intentions had formed the more aesthetically pleasing crystalline structure.21
Nelson’s Global Consciousness Project’s effects had been an especially intriguing example of the power of mass thought. In a sense, they showed the same effect captured by Tiller’s equipment in his laboratory. Intention appeared to be raising order in the ground state of the Zero Point Field. But was there a magic threshold effect, as the Maharishi maintained? And how many people were required to constitute a critical mass? According to the Maharishi’s formula—that the square root of 1 percent of any population practicing advanced meditation will have a positive impact—only 1,730 advanced American meditators would be required to have a positive influence on the United States. and only 8,084 to affect the entire world.
Nelson’s work with FieldREGs had suggested that the size of the group was not as important as the intensity of focus; any group, however small, exerted an effect so long as the parties were involved in rapturous attention. But how many people did the group need to exert an effect? How intently focused did we need to be? What were the true limits of our influence—if any? It was time for me to find my own answers.
The original plan for our first intention experiment, as Popp saw it, was to gather a group of experienced meditators in London, and to have them send positive intention to the Acetabularia acetabulum growing in Popp’s IIB laboratory in Neuss, Germany.
I was deflated after we had discussed the likely target. For our first experiment, I had wanted to help heal burn victims, to save the world from global warming. Single-celled organisms weren’t exactly my idea of heroics and high drama.
Then I began to research algae, and quickly changed my mind. Vital algae were being killed off as a result of global warming. Scientists have discovered an inexorable rise in ocean temperatures over the past century. For the past 30 years, coral reefs, the centerpiece of the sea’s ecosystem, have been vanishing from the Earth. When oceans warm, the algae hugging coral reefs get sloughed off, and without this protective layer, the coral reefs themselves die. About 97 percent of a certain species of coral has disappeared in the Caribbean alone, and the U.S. government has recently declared elkhorn and staghorn coral to be endangered species.
According to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body made up of the world’s leading climatologists and other scientists, the predicted level of warming—up to 10°F by the end of this century—will bring on a disaster of biblical proportions: a rise of sea levels by nearly 3 feet; unendurable heat in many parts of the world; a vast increase of vector-borne diseases; raging floods and storms. A change upward of ten degrees may not seem like much until one realizes that lowering it by the same amount would bring on another ice age.
The key to warding off all the fires and floods appeared to be algae. Algae and other plants are the firefighters of our overheated oceans. Scientists are presently engaged in studying sediments from the ocean’s floor to see how the oceans cope with rising levels of gases. They are especially interested in the reaction of marine plants to global warming, as these plants are the primary shock absorbers of excess carbon dioxide. Algae provide oxygen and other benefits to plant and animal marine life. Algae offer a little wall of protection to the creatures of the sea from the worse excesses of man.
I reconsidered my resistance to Acetabularia as a test subject. Algae might be critical to our survival. The health of most life in the seas depends on these lowly, single-celled creatures, and the seas, like the rain forests, represent the lungs of the Earth. As algae go, so, eventually, do we. Being able to show that mass intention could rescue a sample of algae might demonstrate that our thoughts could combat something as potentially devastating as global warming.
On March 1, 2006, I traveled to Germany to meet Popp and his colleagues at the IIB laboratory on Museum Island in Hombroich, west of Düsseldorf. The “island’s” innovative architecture had first been built to serve the eccentric needs of a millionaire art collector turned Buddhist, Karl Heinrich Müller, who had nowhere to house his vast collection of painting and sculpture. He purchased 650 acres from the American military, and then converted a NATO missile site into an open-air museum.
Müller’s ambitions for the island grew to embrace the possibility of an artists’ and writers’ community. He commissioned a sculptor turned architect named Erwin Heerich and gave him a free hand. Heerich created enormous futuristic brick structures—galleries, a concert hall, working spaces, and even residences—and ingeniously placed them to best advantage against the bleak landscape. Nothing had been wasted; even the disused metal bunkers and rocket silos had been converted into studios and working spaces for famous German artists, writers, and musicians, including the lyricist Thomas Kling and the sculptor Joseph Beuys.
Past a “garden” of buildings of different pastels, the eye alighted on a squat building of interlocking squares on a narrow base, like a giant piece of Lego about to take flight, the new official international site of the IIB. Popp politely accepted the building when it was first offered to him, but found the open, airy loft, with its floor-to-ceiling windows staring out into the vast panorama of Museum Island, completely impractical for his purposes. Before long he set up camp in one of the cramped metal bunkers, left from the Raketenstation, whose small dark rooms are more compatible with the work of counting living light.
There I was met Popp’s team of eight, which included Yu Yan, a Chinese physicist; Sophie Cohen, a French chemist; and Eduard Van Wijk, a Dutch psychologist. Most of the cramped rooms contained photomultipliers, large modern boxes attached to computers that count photon emissions. One room housed another smaller room, with a bed and a photomultiplier for human subjects. Pride of place was reserved for a strange homemade contraption of welded metal circles, resembling a David Smith sculpture of scrap metal that periodically clanged. That, Popp said with pride, was his first photomultiplier, assembled in 1976 by his student, Bernhard Ruth, and still one of the most accurate pieces of equipment in the field. Indeed, he was convinced that it kept improving with age.
In measuring subtle effects, such as the tiny discharges of light from a living thing, it is important to construct a test that will yield a large enough effect to indicate that something has changed. Our experimental design had to be so robust, said Popp, that a positive result could not be dismissed by advocatus diaboli, the scientific process of identifying weaknesses in a scientific hypothesis and providing a ready explanation for anomalous effects. Or, as Gary Schwartz had put it, if we heard hoofbeats, we first had to eliminate horses before leaping to the conclusion that they belonged to zebras.
In our experimental design, we also had to aim for an “on-off, on-off” effect, so that we could isolate any changes as being caused by remote influence. Popp suggested that we have our group send intention intermittently at regular intervals: 10 minutes on, then 10 minutes off, so that we would be “running” intention a few times every hour. If our experiment worked and intention did have an effect, once we plotted our result on a graph it would create an identifiable, zigzag effect.
Popp acquiesced in including dinoflagellates as well as Acetabularia. The light emissions of these fluorescent creatures are extraordinarily responsive to change. As he had seen when they had been placed in shaken water, a change of any sort to which a dinoflagellate is exposed readily shows up as a large shift in emissions of light. I made a further appeal for the use of several subjects. Each would constitute a separate experiment, and then we would have several results to compare. More than one positive finding would be less likely to be the result of chance. Finally, the scientists agreed. We also added a jade plant, and a human subject whom Eduard felt he could enlist.
As Popp had concluded during his experiment with Dick Blasband, change of any sort is easier to see with something ill that you try to make well, so we needed to stress some of our subjects in some way. The most obvious way to stress a life-form is to place it in a hostile medium. Eduard and Sophie decided to pour some vinegar into the medium of the dinoflagellates. We could stress the jade plant by sticking a needle through one of its fleshy leaves. Eduard ultimately decided to stress our human subject with three cups of coffee, but I agreed not to disclose this fact to my meditators, to see if they picked up any psychic information about her. We decided to leave the Acetabularia alone, to test whether our intentions could also affect a healthy organism. To make it simple, our meditators would send intentions for the biophoton emissions of each organism to decrease and for its health and well-being to improve.
The experiment would run at night, between 3 P.M. and 9 P.M. Eduard and Sophia would turn on the equipment, and I would select three half-hour windows within that time frame, unbeknownst to them, to carry out our group intentions. Although it was impossible to conduct a double-blind trial (all of us in London would of course know when we sent our healing intention), we could create “single-blind” conditions and control for experimenter effects by ensuring that neither our human subject nor the scientists knew when intention was being sent. I would reveal our schedule to them only after the experiment had taken place.
Our study design was constrained by the equipment. A photomultiplier cannot run with the shutter open continually for six hours, so we decided to turn it on from the hour to the half hour, and give it a rest between the half hour and the hour. I would instruct my meditators to send an intention to all four subjects for two 10-minute sessions during the three time windows I’d chosen. Eduard and Popp planned to look for any qualitative differences in the kind of light being emitted. Any change in the signal or the quantum nature of the photons during the times we were “running” intention would suggest that change had occurred from an outside influence and that we were having an effect.
I took some photos of our subjects and the scientists. Before leaving, I stole a last look at the Acetabularia, growing in small pots in a converted, darkened refrigerator; and the dinoflagellates, which resembled tiny green specks in the water—tiny participants about to be stressed, and possibly sacrificed, in the name of science.
A few weeks later, Eduard found a human volunteer in one of his Dutch colleagues, Annemarie Durr,22 a laser biologist and a meditator of long standing. Although rather skeptical about our plan, she was happy to be our first subject. Her agreement to participate was a particularly generous gesture, as it would entail sitting still on a bed in a pitch-black room for six hours.
At one of our conferences in mid-March, I asked for volunteers to participate in a first intention experiment from those among our audience who were experienced meditators. I prepared a PowerPoint presentation to brief them on the subjects of our experiment and the experimental protocol, and to reinforce my oral presentation, and set the day for March 28, at 5:30 P.M., at a university lecture room I had hired for the evening.
That night, there was such a fierce hailstorm when my colleague Nicolette Vuvan and I left our office for the train to central London that we had to take momentary shelter in a doorway. We were half soaked after battling through a torrent of rain, but I was thrilled with the atmospheric conditions—a dark, stormy night would only aid our activities. Weather this wild often results from geomagnetic or atmospheric disturbance, which I knew enhances psychokinetic effects. When I checked with the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s website later that evening, I discovered that it noted “unsettled” conditions for the evening, with a fair degree of geomagnetic activity and minor to major storms in space.
Despite the weather, sixteen volunteers showed up. I asked them to fill out a collection of forms, which included personal information plus several psychological tests used by Gary Schwartz and Stanley Krippner, including the Arizona Integrative Outcomes Scale and the Hartmann Boundary Questionnaire test, to test psychic ability. I wanted as much data as possible in order to gauge whether their state of mind, psychic talent, or health status would have any bearing on our results.
I explained the experiment, offered photographs and details about our four subjects, and then went over the protocol. We would be sending our intentions from 6 P.M. to 8:30 P.M. at every hour on the hour to 10 minutes past and from 20 past until the half hour. In between those times we would rest, chat, and fill out the forms.
We began at six on the dot. As William Tiller had done in his black-box experiments, I displayed the intentions in writing on the computer screen as I read them out loud so that all the meditators would be sending exactly the same thought during each meditation. I led the meditation; directed our focus to each target subject, showing its image on-screen; and read aloud the sentence that sent our intention to lower the subject’s biophoton emissions and increase its state of health and well-being.
The shared energy immediately felt tangible and increased in power as the evening went on. Michael, one of our group members, suggested that we call our algae “Dino” and “Tabu,” to establish some relationship with these little organisms. Although no one had any prior experience in telepathy, some participants began to pick up information about our subjects, notably Annemarie. Several meditators were convinced that she was an amateur singer, and had a recurrent problem with her throat. Isabel thought she might be suffering from gut problems or something gynecological. Michael, who was German, kept thinking of the term im Schutz der Dunkelheit (“under protection of darkness”), and interpreted it to mean that she was wrapped up in a blanket. Amy said she received a mental image of Annemarie wrapped up in a luxuriously soft blanket on a hard surface and at times asleep. She was also convinced that Annemarie had eaten something disagreeable and that her stomach was upset.
Many meditators felt a connection to the jade plant and “Tabu,” and Peter had a strong sense that Acetabularia was responding most to the intentions—but with few exceptions the group had the most difficulty establishing any connection with “Dino,” and this difficulty increased to the point where most felt no connection at all by the final session.
All of us were infused with a strong sense of purpose and momentarily lost a sense of our individual identities. By the end of the evening, I had cast out my own doubts about the study and the niggling thought that what we were trying to do was faintly ludicrous. Even though we were not healers, we had all felt as if a healing of sorts had occurred. Whatever had happened in there, I thought, heading back out into the stormy night, that we’d had some kind of effect.
Several days later, I sent Popp our meditation schedule so that his team could compile our results. I also spoke with Annemarie. Some of our extrasensory impressions had been correct. It was true she sang as a hobby and periodically suffered with a blocked throat. Although she ordinarily did not especially suffer problems in the gut, she did that night because the three cups of coffee Eduard had asked her to drink upset her stomach. Yet even though coffee late in the afternoon usually agitated her and caused insomnia, on the night of our experiment she drifted off at various points throughout the six hours of the experiment and slept easily that night. She described tingling bodily sensations she had felt periodically through the evening, and the times of their occurrence corresponded with the first and third sessions when we had been “running” intention. Nevertheless, we had also picked up some “noise”: she was not a vegetarian and never listened to or sang Vivaldi, as a couple of meditators had felt.
When analyzing the data, Eduard studied not only the intensity of light but also its deviation from symmetry: normal emissions from a living thing, when plotted on a graph as a bell curve, are perfectly symmetrical. He also looked at any deviations in the kurtosis, or the customary “peakedness” of the distribution. High Kurtosis means a bell curve that is high around the middle, or mean. Again, when emissions are plotted on a graph, the normal peak distribution is zero—the highs and lows cancel each other out. After examining our twelve block periods—the six times we sent intention and the six periods of rest—he found no change in light intensity. But he did find large changes in the skewness (from 1.124 to 0.922), showing a lack of the customary symmetry, and kurtosis (from 2.403 to 1.581) of the emissions. Something in the light was profoundly altered.
Eduard was excited by the results. They exactly matched those he had observed during his study of healers, when he had tested whether the act of healing has a “scatter effect” on any other living things in the environment where the healing takes place. In the study, when he had placed some algae with a photon counter in the presence of a healer and his patients and measured the photons of the algae during 36 healings, he had been surprised to discover that the photon count distributions of the algae had “remarkable” alterations during the healing rituals. Large shifts in the cyclical components of the emissions had occurred. His tiny study had suggested that healing caused a shift in the light emissions of everything in its path.23 Now he had discovered the same effect when simple intention was sent by ordinary people from 300 miles away.
On April 12, Fritz Popp sent me data on the the algae, the dinoflagellates, and the jade plant. Although at first glance the numbers had convinced him we had had no effect, he changed his mind once he performed his calculations. Ordinarily, any stressed living thing will begin to accustom itself to the stress, and its light emissions, although initially large, will naturally begin to decrease as the organism gets used to its new circumstances. Consequently, in order to work out a true demonstration of the effect of change, Popp had to control for this phenomenon. He worked out mathematically a means of starting from zero, so that any deviation from normal behavior would readily show up. In this way, he would then be able to determine whether any additional change represented an increase or a decrease in the number of biophoton emissions. The number of emissions he then plotted on his graph reflected any excess increase or decrease from the norm.
In all three instances, our subjects registered a significant decrease in biophotons during the meditation sessions, compared with the control periods. The dinoflagellates had been killed by the acid, in the end (one possible reason why they had been so difficult for our meditators to detect). Nevertheless, Popp said, their response (a lowering of emissions by nearly 140,000) was significantly different from the normal emissions of a dying organism. Among the survivors, the Acetabularia, the healthy subject, had evidenced a larger effect than the jade plant, perhaps because it was not overcoming a stress (544 emissions lower than normal), whereas with the jade plant (which had 65.5 emissions lower than normal), the stress (the pin) remained in the leaf during the experiment.
He plotted the results on a graph, marking out the portions in red that represented the times of our healing intentions, and e-mailed them to me. We had indeed produced a “zigzag” effect. During meditation, Popp wrote in his report, “there is a clear preference of dropping down reactions rather than going up,” which tracked the times of our intentions. With the Acetabularia, we had had an overall decrease over the norm of 573 emissions, and an increase of only 29.
Our little meditation effort had created a major healing effect, a significant decrease in living light. Not only that, but the effect from all that distance was similar to the effect by an experienced healer healing in the same room. The intention of our group had created the same light as a healer’s.
I soon discovered that my volunteers were ideal candidates for an intention experiment. According to the forms they’d filled out for me, they’d meditated for an average of fourteen years, and their test scores on the psychological tests I’d given them showed that, as a group, they had very thin boundaries; tended toward a highly positive outlook; enjoyed excellent mental, emotional and physical health; and evidenced powerful emotions.
In many ways, it was a crude first effort. We had, after all, tested four subjects, some stressed and some not, and one had died. We had made use of control periods, but not control subjects. Both Eduard and Popp cautioned me not to take too much notice of it: “We have to be sure that these changes in kurtosis and skewness are real. That means that we have to repeat the experiments a couple of times,” said Eduard. “Despite the right tendency of the results,” wrote Popp, “I do not dare to state that it is proof.”
But despite these caveats, the fact was that we’d recorded a significant effect. In the end, achieving a positive result didn’t really surprise me. For more than thirty years Popp, Schlitz, Schwartz, and all their fellow scientists have been amassing unimpeachable evidence in other experiments that has stretched credulity. Frontier research into the nature of human consciousness has upended everything that we have hitherto considered scientific certainty about our world. These discoveries offer convincing evidence that all matter in the universe exists in a web of connection and constant influence, which often overrides many of the laws of the universe that we used to believe held ultimate sovereignty.
The significance of these findings extends far beyond a validation of extrasensory power or parapsychology. They threaten to demolish the entire edifice of present-day science. The discoveries of Tom Rosenbaum, Sai Ghosh, and Anton Zeilinger that quantum effects occur in the world of the tangible could signal an end to the divide in modern physics between the laws of the large and the laws of the quantum particle, and the beginning of single rule book defining all of life.
Our definition of the physical universe as a collection of isolated objects, our definition of ourselves as just another of those objects, even our most basic understanding of time and space, will have to be recast. At least forty top scientists in academic centers of research around the world have demonstrated that an information transfer constantly carries on between living things, and that thought forms are simply another aspect of transmitted energy. Hundreds of others have offered plausible theories embracing even the most counterintuitive effects, such as time-displaced influence, as now consistent with the laws of physics.
We can no longer view ourselves as isolated from our environment, and our thoughts as the private, self-contained workings of an individual brain. Dozens of scientists have produced thousands of papers in the scientific literature offering sound evidence that thoughts are capable of profoundly affecting all aspects of our lives. As observers and creators, we are constantly remaking our world at every instant. Every thought we have, every judgment we hold, however unconscious, is having an effect. With every moment that it notices, the conscious mind is sending an intention.
These revelations force us to rethink not only what it is to be human, but also how to relate. We may have to reconsider the effect of everything that we think, whether we vocalize it or not. Our relationship with the world carries on, even in our silence.
We must also recognize that these ideas are no longer the ruminations of a few eccentric individuals. The power of thought underpins many well-accepted disciplines in every reach of life, from orthodox and alternative medicine to competitive sport. Modern medicine must fully appreciate the central role of intention in healing. Medical scientists often speak of the “placebo effect” as an annoying impediment to the proof of the efficacy of a chemical agent. It is time that we understood and made full use of the power of the placebo. Repeatedly, the mind has proved to be a far more powerful healer than the greatest of breakthrough drugs.
We will have to reframe our understanding of our own biology in more miraculous terms. We are only beginning to understand the vast and untapped human potential at our disposal: the human being’s extraordinary capacity to influence the world. This potential is every person’s birthright, not simply that of the gifted master. Our thoughts may be an inexhaustible and simple resource that can be called upon to focus our lives, heal our illnesses, clean up our cities, and improve the planet. We may have the power as communities to improve the quality of our air and water, our crime and accident statistics, the educational levels of our children. One well-directed thought may be a gentle but effective way for men and women on the street to take matters of global interest into their own hands.
This knowledge may give us back a sense of individual and collective power, which has been wrested from us largely by the current worldview espoused by modern science, which portrays an indifferent universe populated by things that are separate and unengaged. Indeed, an understanding of the power of conscious thought may also bring science closer to religion by offering scientific proof of the intuitive understanding, held by most of us, that to be alive is to be far more than an assemblage of chemicals and electrical signaling.
We must open our minds to the wisdom of many native traditions, which hold an intuitive understanding of intention. Virtually all these cultures describe a unified energy field not unlike the Zero Point Field, holding everything in the universe in its invisible web. These other cultures understand our place in a hierarchy of energy and the value of choosing time and place with care. The modern science of remote influence has finally offered proof of ancient intuitive beliefs about manifestation, healing, and the power of thoughts. We would do well to appreciate, as these traditional cultures do, that every thought is sacred, with the power to take physical form.
Both modern science and ancient practices can teach us how to use our extraordinary power of intention. If we could learn how to direct our potential for influence in a positive manner, we could improve every aspect of our world. Medicine, healing, education, even our interaction with our technology, would benefit from a greater comprehension of the mind’s inextricable involvement in its world. If we begin to grasp the remarkable power of human consciousness, we will advance our understanding of ourselves as human beings in all our complexity.
But there are still many more questions to ask about the nature of intention. Frontier science is the art of inquiring about the impossible. All our major achievements in history have resulted from asking an outrageous question. What if stones fall from the sky? What if giant metal objects could overcome gravity? What if there is no end of the Earth to sail off? What if time is not absolute, but depends on where you are? All the discoveries about intention and remote influence have similarly proceeded from asking a seemingly absurd question: what if our thoughts could affect the things around us?
True science, unafraid to explore the dark passages of our ignorance, always begins with an unpopular question, even if there is no prospect of an immediate answer—even if the answer threatens to overturn every last one of our cherished beliefs. The scientists engaged in consciousness research must constantly put forward unpopular questions about the nature of the mind and the extent of its reach. In our group experiments, we will be asking the most impossible question of all: what if a group thought could heal a remote target? It is a little like asking, what if a thought could heal the world? It is an outlandish question, but the most important part of scientific investigation is just the simple willingness to ask the question. As Bob Barth of the Office of Prayer Research commented, when asked whether prayer research should continue in the wake of the Benson STEP study: “We can’t find the answers if we don’t keep asking the questions.” That is how we will begin our own experiments—unafraid to ask the question, whatever the answer.