Around the Laurentian University campus in Canada, Michael Persinger’s basement vault was known as the Chamber of Heaven and Hell. Room COO2B, a disused sound booth, was a relic of the 1970s, its original fittings intact: enormous nylon loudspeakers, deep orange-flecked shag carpeting, and a single item of furniture—a stained brown polyester armchair. More than 2,000 people had occupied the chair in pure darkness, a modified yellow motorcycle helmet on their heads, surrendering all control of their next half hour to the scientists behind the glass booth. Persinger, a neuroscientist, was the god of room COO2B. He had become expert in manipulating brain waves to yield up a divine experience, or, as he referred to it, “a sensed presence.” With a few simple commands typed into a computer, he would instruct the helmet to send low-level magnetic fields coursing through the temporal lobes of his volunteers, abruptly switching sides of the brain to heighten the transcendent and occasionally terrifying nature of the experience.1
Jesus had been sighted in the brown polyester reclining chair, as had the Virgin Mary, Muhammad, monks in hooded robes, knights in shining armor, and a Native American deity, the Sky Spirit. Out-of-body experiences had been produced, near-death experiences relived. One journalist had been transported back to his life’s most transcendent moment—the time he first laid eyes on his high-school girlfriend’s perfect breasts.
Not all visitors found God. There had been imaginings of alien sightings and abductions, and even a satanic ritual. One volunteer, overwhelmed by the sight of an enormous set of eyes and the smell of burning sulfur, attempted to pull himself loose from the helmet and wrench off the blindfold and earplugs. As soon as the 500-pound door was pried open for him he fled, terrorized, from the room.
The nature of the experience depended, Persinger and his assistants explained, on a physiological roll of the dice: the sensitivity of the left amygdala of the brain compared with its counterpart on the right. If the left is more sensitive, and you send magnetic waves coursing through it, you get heaven. If you are unlucky enough to be born with a more sensitive right amygdala, you get hell.2
Persinger had a singular passion: the subtle influences of geology and meteorology on human biology, particularly the electrical circuitry of the brain. A transplant from the American South, he had headed north in the 1960s to avoid the draft and a likely stint in Vietnam—a war he objected to on moral grounds—and he remained in Canada after receiving a professorship at Laurentian in 1971. Forty years later, he seemed an unlikely draft dodger, with his three-piece pinstripe suits, gold-chain swag and watch fob, and clipped, offhand manner. This conservative posturing masked a bold curiosity that led him into exotic areas of inquiry—the rhythms of biological systems, the volatile energy of outer space, the nature of epilepsy, the source of mystical visions—disparate areas that eventually converged in his mind after an extraordinary epiphany. Persinger realized that living things are attuned not only to each other, but also to the Earth and its continually shifting magnetic energies. This remarkable revelation, built upon the discoveries of Franz Halberg, would convince me that careful timing to coincide with these energies might be vital for an effective intention.
In 1948, as a young medic at Harvard Medical School on a temporary visa from war-torn Austria, Franz Halberg was assigned an impossible task: to help find the cure of all disease.3 At the time, the cure was assumed to involve the cortical hormones secreted by the adrenal glands, which enable the body to adapt to the ordinary stresses of life. The search was on to find reasonable substitutes for the body’s own scarce supply of steroids.
Halberg had been singled out to study mice whose adrenal glands had been removed and who were then injected with adrenaline in order to observe the effect on their circulating white blood cells called eosinophils. In ordinary circumstances, adrenaline will set off a predictable seesaw, causing more of the body’s natural steroids to be secreted, in turn lowering the eosinophil count. However, in animals or humans without adrenal glands, the count should remain static. But the cell count in Halberg’s mice still seemed to fluctuate, even after he had removed all trace of adrenal tissue. Later, after moving to the University of Minnesota, he carried on his studies with a near limitless supply of experimental mice, and came up with the same conclusions. Even when he handled them less frequently, a procedure which should have caused less stress to the tiny creatures, he noticed more variation in cell count.
Halberg was mystified by this fluctuation, until he suddenly recognized a recurring pattern: the cell counts were always higher in the morning and lower at night. The variation was rising and falling according to a predictable, 24-hour cycle. Halberg studied other biological processes, and discovered that many appear to run according to a built-in clock. All living things respond to the same 24-hour rhythm, in tandem with the Earth’s rotation. Halberg coined the terms “chronobiology”—the influence of time and certain periodic cycles on biological function—and “circadian” (from Latin circa = about; and dies = day) for daily biological rhythms. He created the Chronobiology Laboratories at the University of Minnesota and became known as the father of chronobiology. Chronobiology, as his lab began to discover, is a ready-made feature of organisms, not simply something learned or acquired—an inherent property of life.
Besides circadian rhythms, Halberg also discovered that living things keep in time with many other periodic rhythms; half-weekly, weekly, monthly, and yearly cycles govern virtually every biological function. The human pulse and blood pressure, body temperature and blood clotting, circulation of lymphocytes, hormonal cycles, and other functions of the human body all appear to ebb and flow according to some basic, recurring timetable. These rhythms are not unique to humans, but are present throughout nature, and evident even in fossils of single-cell organisms that existed millions of years ago.
Initially Halberg believed that the master switch for these biological rhythms was located in certain cells of the brain or adrenal glands. However, certain cycles carried on even when Halberg removed the brain cells in question—the adrenal glands—and even the brain itself. In his eighties, Halberg made his final breakthrough discovery: the synchronizer within every living thing is not internal but resides in the planets—particularly the sun.4
The sun is a furious star. This huge ball of gases, with a surface temperature of around 11,000°F, is encased by strong magnetic fields in the outer solar atmosphere—a recipe for periodic explosions, as the gases build up and magnetic fields intersect on the sun’s surface. Although the patch of space between sun and Earth used to be considered an uneventful vacuum, “space weather” is now understood to be weather so extreme, of such unimaginable turbulence, that if transferred to Earth it would blow up the entire planet in an instant. Solar wind, a constant blast of electrified gas, dominates this interplanetary medium, soaring past the Earth at speeds up to 2 million miles per hour. Although the Earth’s magnetic field usually deflects it, this gale can penetrate our magnetic field during moments of intense solar activity.
Sunspots—vortices of concentrated magnetic fields, visible to us as dark blobs on the sun’s surface—begin to accumulate and then to disappear in fairly regular cycles, so that scientists can make some predictions about when the sun is likely to erupt. A solar cycle of waxing and waning activity occurs, on average, every eleven years. As sunspots build up, so does the sun’s aggressive behavior. At unpredictable moments, it hurls solar flares, gaseous explosions with the energy of 40 billion atomic bombs, probably caused by the ripping apart and reconnection of strong magnetic fields. Electrified bullets of high-energy protons from the nuclei of gases are picked up by the solar wind and flung toward Earth at speeds of more than 5 million miles per hour, showering our atmosphere with radiation and ionization. Periodically, the sun also releases a corona mass ejection, a ball of gas and magnetic fields of up to a billion tons, which also speeds toward Earth at several million miles per hour, causing extreme geomagnetic storms in space.
Scientists have long understood that Earth is, in effect, a giant magnet with two poles—North and South—surrounded by a magnetic field that is always in flux. This field encircles the Earth like a doughnut in a region of space called the “magnetosphere,” and is kept in place by the solar wind, with a force of about 0.5 gauss or 50,000 nanoteslas—about 1,000 times weaker than that of a typical horseshoe magnet.
The geomagnetic fields (GMFs) differ in different regions and at varying times. Any changes in our solar system (the activity of the sun, the movement of the planets, the daily oscillation of the Earth in its rotation) or geological changes on Earth (the presence of groundwater or the movement of the Earth’s molten inner core) can alter the strength of the Earth’s GMF on a daily basis. Storms in space transfer some of the energy of the solar wind to the Earth’s magnetosphere, causing wild fluctuations of direction and speed in the particles in the Earth’s magnetic field. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which tracks these volatile space weather patterns, reckons that over any given solar cycle, geomagnetic storms in space will occur about a third of the time, and almost half of them are severe enough to interfere with modern technology. Storms of this magnitude (G5, maximum severity on the NOAA scale) can disrupt portions of the Earth’s electrical power, pipeline flow, and high-tech communications systems, and disorient spacecraft and satellite navigation systems. In March 1989, one such storm left 6 million people in Montreal without electric power for nine hours.
At the time Halberg made his discoveries, geomagnetic storms were known to have a profound effect on the movement and orientation of animals such as pigeons and dolphins, which make use of the Earth’s geomagnetic field to navigate. Biologists assumed that the Earth’s weak magnetic field had little effect on basic biological processes, particularly as living things have daily exposure to the more powerful electromagnetic and magnetic fields generated by modern technology. But in the course of investigating the health implications of space flight, the Soviet government uncovered evidence that natural geomagnetic fields, particularly those of extremely low frequencies (less than 100 hertz), have a pronounced effect on virtually all cellular and chemical processes in living things.
When Russian scientists at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences explored the effects of space weather on cosmonauts being sent into space, they discovered that protein synthesis in bacteria cells is highly susceptible to changes in geomagnetic fields, and that this disturbance in protein synthesis also affects human microorganisms.5 Geomagnetic disturbances influence the synthesis of micronutrients in plants; even single-celled algae respond to solar-cycle flux.6 So attuned are plants and microorganisms to these changes that the Russian researchers made use of them as a sensitive barometer for geomagnetic disturbances.7
The Soviet scientists also discovered that if the cosmonauts suffered cardiac arrest, it was usually during a magnetic storm.8 Illness on Earth also appeared to parallel geomagnetic activity in space; both sickness and death increased on stormy geomagnetic days.9 But of all the systems in the body affected, changes in solar geomagnetic conditions most disturbed the rhythms of the heart.
The Space Research Institute scientists tracked the heart rate of healthy volunteers over an entire solar cycle and compared it with sunspot and other geomagnetic activity during that period. The healthiest heart rate is one with the greatest variation. In the Russian research the most varied heart rate occurred during times of the least amount of solar activity,10 while heart rate variability (HRV) decreased during magnetic storms. A disturbance in heart rate variability most affects the autonomic nervous system, the system in the body that keeps it ticking over without any conscious intervention. A low HRV increases the risk of all coronary artery disease and heart attack. During increased geomagnetic activity, the viscosity, or thickness, of the blood also increases sharply, sometimes doubling, and the bloodstream slows down.11
Sudden cardiovascular death also appears to be linked with solar geomagnetic activity.12 Heart-attack rates rise and fall according to solar-cycle activity:13 the largest number of sudden deaths from heart disease occurred within a day of a geomagnetic storm.14 Halberg himself discovered a 5 percent increase in heart attacks in Minnesota during times of peak maximum solar activity.15
It is not surprising that biological systems like human beings are sensitive to external signals, such as geomagnetic disturbances. Magnetic fields are caused by the flow of electrons and atoms with charge, known as ions, and whenever magnetic forces change, they alter the direction of the flow of these atoms and particles. Ultimately, since living organisms are also composed of particles like electrons, any profound change of magnetic direction may markedly alter their biological processes.
Once Halberg understood the effect of the Earth’s geomagnetic field on living things, he renamed his life’s work “chronoastrobiology”—the rhythms of biology as affected by astral bodies. The sun was the giant metronome setting the pace for all of life.
Persinger’s interests had mostly to do with geomagnetic effects on the brain. Researchers in the Soviet bloc had also discovered that space weather can also affect the neurological processes. Scientists at the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences at Baku used a special device enabling them to continuously monitor the electrical activity of the heart and brain in a small number of healthy volunteers, and to compare those rhythms with those of the Earth’s geomagnetic field.
They discovered that geomagnetic activity has a strong influence on brain functioning. During magnetically stormy days, EEG readings get destabilized.16 Geomagnetic turbulence also disturbs the balance between certain parts of the brain and profoundly disrupts communication within the nervous system, overactivating certain aspects of the autonomic nervous system and lowering others.17
The sun’s activity also affects mental equilibrium. As Persinger discovered, the more unsettled the weather in space, the greater the number of patients hospitalized for nervous disorders and the greater number of attempted suicides.18 Geomagnetic disturbance also seemed to correlate with increases in general psychiatric disorders.19 Even those already suffering from mental illness get more agitated during magnetically stormy days.
Persinger grew intrigued by a possible relationship between geomagnetic fluctuations in the Earth and the timing of epileptic seizures, after his neuroscientist colleague Todd Murphy, who had temporal-lobe epilepsy as a child, disclosed that he often had out-of-body experiences while having a seizure. Some data had already linked an increase in geomagnetic activity with the timing of epileptic seizures.20 Could an epileptic fit result from geomagnetic disturbance? Persinger decided to study this possibility in an animal. He injected a batch of laboratory rats with lithium pilocarpine, which causes epileptic-like seizures in the rodents, and compared the timing of the onset of seizures about an hour after the onset of laboratory-simulated increased geomagnetic activity.21 From this Persinger inferred that above a certain threshold of geomagnetic activity, epilepsy is more likely to be triggered. Whenever geomagnetic activity exceeded 20 nanoteslas, seizures would occur more frequently.22
Persinger then discovered a relationship between sudden death—from epilepsy or SIDS death—and high levels of geomagnetic activity.23 Sudden, seemingly inexplicable deaths might have a rational explanation after all: people with weaker constitutions are at the mercy of the sun’s restless activity.
Strong geomagnetic fields also appear to affect learning profoundly—often for the better. Increased geomagnetic activity enhances memory: rats exposed to geomagnetic fields learn mazes more quickly.24 Large fluctuations in solar activity cause other subtle effects in human behavior and performance—for instance, the ability to perform a skilled task.25 Psychologist Dean Radin once examined the effect of GMFs on bowling. He tracked the performance of experienced bowlers over a number of periods, and then compared their scores with the geomagnetic activity of the same period. Large geomagnetic fluctuations the day before a match appeared to cause more uneven results than normal—a 41 percent variance in the men’s scores, compared with the more consistent scores obtained during days of geomagnetic stability.26 Other research has demonstrated that the greater the change in the Earth’s geomagnetic field, the greater the number of traffic violations and industrial accidents.27 The most important determinant appeared to be large change in geomagnetic activity, either from turbulent to calm or the reverse.
Although periodically destabilizing, exposure to the daily ebb and flow of Earth’s geomagnetic activity may be essential to life here. The Solar Terrestrial Influences Laboratory at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia carried out biological experiments on board the Soviet Mir space station to examine what happens to cosmonauts who are deprived of contact with the Earth’s geomagnetic field while in space. The scientists constructed a “geomagnetic vacuum,” a six-meter stainless steel decompression press-chamber, which partially blocked out the Earth’s natural geomagnetic field. Seven healthy young men were sealed off in the chamber and their bodily processes analyzed. After being placed in the decompression chamber, the men evidenced a number of upsets in brain-wave activity. Sleep was more restless, with fewer periods of deep sleep.28
Contact with geomagnetic fields may play a primary role in maintaining the equilibrium of the nervous system. Indeed, the Earth’s tiny geomagnetic fluctuations have the most profound effect on the two major engines of the body: the heart and the brain.
Persinger went on to discover other extraordinary geophysical effects on human beings. Electromagnetic and geomagnetic phenomena resulting from the Earth’s shifting plates, from earthquakes, or from unusually high rainfall levels—even electromagnetic “luminosities,” or lights in the sky—can all stimulate certain portions of the brain that produce hallucinations. Between 1968 and 1971, more than 100,000 people reported observing visions of an apparition of the Virgin Mary above a church in Zeitoun, Egypt. When Persinger examined the seismic activity in the area over the same time period, he discovered an unprecedented peak in earthquake activity.29 Sometimes the electromagnetic effects were man-made. At one point he studied a Roman Catholic woman with early brain trauma who reported nightly visitations by the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, he discovered the source of the miracle; her disability caused her to be unduly affected by the electric alarm clock situated near her head as she slept.30
Persinger wondered whether he could reproduce these types of geomagnetic disturbances in the laboratory. His colleague Stan Koren modified and wired up a motorcycle helmet (thereafter named the “Koren” helmet) so that it could send out very-low-frequency complex magnetic fields—about the amount that radiates from a telephone handset—in precise directions. Participants would be fitted in the helmet, then placed in the acoustic chamber of room COO2B, which had been especially adapted to block out electromagnetic noise. Turning on the helmet would produce what Persinger referred to as “temporal lobe transients,” or something possibly like microseizures—tiny episodes causing alterations in neuronal firing patterns. This produced virtually the same effect on the brain as exposure to increased ambient geomagnetic activity.
Over time, Persinger began to recognize patterns. The brain waves of his participants would fall into resonance with the complex magnetic fields and remain in synchrony for up to 10 seconds after he had turned off the helmet.31 Through trial and error, he discovered that the portion of the brain most susceptible to electromagnetic and geomagnetic effects are the right temporal lobes. Sending low-level (1 microtesla), pulsed magnetic fields over the right cerebral hemisphere slowed brain waves to an alpha rhythm (8–13 hertz), but only on the right side.32
Our “sense of self” and our sense of “the other” are housed in both temporal lobes, but primarily in the left hemisphere, where the language centers are located. To function normally, the left and right temporal lobes must work in harmony. If something upsets this balance, the brain will sense another “self” and create a hallucination. As Persinger discovered in his experiments, stimulating the right temporal lobe portion of the brain generates the sense, presence, or feeling of spiritual visions, both good and bad. Aiming magnetic fields at the amygdala of the brain at the same time colors the experience with intense emotion, just as occurs during a spiritual experience. By stimulating first one side of the amygdala and then the other, Persinger found that he could heighten the emotional complexion of the experience.
Volunteers wearing the Koren helmet experienced divine epiphanies, apparitions, out-of-body sensations, and even a hallucination of Satan purely through temporal-lobe stimulation. The nature of the experience largely depended on the participant’s individual history: negative early life experiences tend to increase the sensitivity of the right temporal lobe, and those with a high proportion of such experiences tend to have a negative experience while wearing the helmet. A happier person, with a more sensitive left temporal lobe, is more likely to experience a sense of the divine.33
It would have been tempting for Persinger to conclude that all spiritual experience is simply geomagnetically induced hallucination, except for one unsettling fact: extrasensory perception and other psychic abilities appear to be more acute during particular types of geomagnetic activity. When the Earth is “calm” and geomagnetic flux at an ebb, telepathic and extrasensory perceptions increase.34 Even minor environmental changes—from slight variations in the weather to solar patterns—appear to have a profound effect on extrasensory perception or the ability to view things remotely. The reverse occurs with psychokinesis—mental attempts to change physical matter. The power of intention increases when the Earth’s energy is agitated.35
In the 1970s, Persinger was able to test the effects of geomagnetic activity on telepathy during sleep by teaming up with noted parapsychologist Stanley Krippner, then the director of a dream laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center in New York City. Krippner had perfected an experimental protocol to test telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition in dreams during deep sleep. Volunteers would be paired off. While one partner slept, the other would be in a separate room and would be asked to concentrate on an image and attempt to “transmit” the image to the dreamer, so that it would be incorporated into his dream. Upon waking, the participants who had been sleeping would describe their dreams in great detail, to determine whether they contained anything resembling the target pictures they had been sent during their slumbers.36
Persinger and Krippner found that participants did better on certain days than on others. When they tracked geomagnetic activity during the period of the study, they discovered that the dreamers had significantly higher accuracy in picking up the target pictures on nights when the Earth’s GMF activity was relatively quiet.37
Geomagnetic activity also affects precognitive dreams—those that forecast events. Dr. Alan Vaughan, a well-known clairvoyant whose dreams accurately foretold the future in great detail, kept a detailed dream diary in order to compare their contents with future events. One of Vaughan’s dreams predicted the murder of the presidential candidate Robert Kennedy two days before he was assassinated.38 An examination of the geomagnetic activity on the nights that Vaughan had dreamed sixty-one such premonitions showed that it was significantly quieter on the days when he had his most accurate dreams.39
During days of geomagnetic calm, spontaneous instances of telepathy or clairvoyance are more likely to occur40 and remote viewing accuracy is more likely to improve.41 Persinger carried out his own intriguing test of ESP using a group of couples. One member of each pair was shown an image while it was being bathed in magnetic fields, then asked to describe the memory of an experience he or she had shared with his or her partner that was prompted by the image. Simultaneously, in another room, the partners were shown the same images and also asked to describe a memory. When Persinger compared the results, he discovered that the two narratives were most alike when the magnetic activity was at its quietest. The greater the magnetic activity, the less the two sets of memories mirrored each other.42
Nevertheless, the two sexes appear to respond very differently to geomagnetic activity, as Persinger discovered after comparing a database of paranormal experiences with geomagnetic activity and breaking down the data by sex. Men tended to have more premonitions on days when geomagnetic activity was high (above 20 nanoteslas), whereas women reported more premonitions if the geomagnetic activity was low (below 20 nanoteslas). Men also tended to have more accurate memories with higher geomagnetic activity; women, with lower geomagnetic activity. Just as Krippner had found, the people most susceptible to extrasensory experiences were those with “thin boundaries,” particularly those who had already had paranormal encounters.43
With time, Persinger found that he could enhance powers of extrasensory perception with the artificial geomagnetic fields of the Koren helmet. The remote-viewing ability of one of his students considerably improved after this student was exposed to weak horizontal magnetic fields.44
In 1998, Persinger decided to put the Koren helmet to the ultimate test. Could it interrupt the ability of one of the greatest remote viewers in the world? He invited Ingo Swann to his basement lab. Swann, then sixty-eight, soon proved he had lost none of his extrasensory prowess; he correctly described and drew in great detail images of randomly selected photographs sealed in envelopes in another room. Nevertheless, after Persinger bathed the photos in complex magnetic field patterns, Swann’s accuracy suddenly plummeted. The most disruptive fields had different signal waveforms of varying phases. This suggested that Swann was picking up the information in a waveform and that those signals were easily interrupted by magnetic fields that could disturb their coherence.45 As Gary Schwartz had also discovered, information transmitted or received by human beings must have a strong magnetic component.
Persinger’s evidence persuaded me that geomagnetic activity influences the clarity of our reception in picking up quantum information. But do geomagnetic fields also affect the strength of our transmissions and their effect on the physical world? Research by Stanley Krippner offers a few clues. Krippner wished to test the hypothesis that psychokinesis is likely to occur on days when the Earth is “noisy.” He and his team visited Brazilian sensitive Amyr Amiden, known for his extraordinary psychokinetic ability, and set about comparing the time of Amiden’s psychokinetic activities with geomagnetic fluctuations in the Brasília area, where the sessions were taking place. Krippner’s team also took readings of Amiden’s pulse and blood pressure.
The team found a significant correlation between Amiden’s psychic feats and the daily geomagnetic index for the entire southern hemisphere. For instance, Amiden performed the most feats on March 10 and March 15, which were the days that month with the greatest geomagnetic activity. He produced nothing out of the ordinary on March 20, the geomagnetically quietest day of the month.46
Amiden’s psychic abilities were preceded by both a rise in his diastolic blood pressure (the pressure of the blood as it returns to the heart) and a rise in geomagnetic “noise.” It may be that geomagnetic activity must first cause changes in the “heart brain” before a person can transmit information that can affect physical matter.
Interestingly, as with couples in the Love Study, Amiden’s most powerful psychokinetic effects anticipated strong input: in his case, geomagnetic flux. In one instance, two religious medallions suddenly materialized in the room where Amiden and the researchers were present, appearing to drop from the ceiling—an event that was followed by a sudden rise in the area’s geomagnetic field. Can humans anticipate this geomagnetic noise, and, if so, do such anticipatory windows offer them more psychokinetic power than usual?
Psychologist William Braud carried out some intriguing studies of the effect of geomagnetic fields on intention by examining whether high levels of geomagnetic activity were correlated with powers of remote influence. Braud examined the effect of sending intention to human blood cells and to another person. Like Krippner, he discovered that the success of intention was linked to a “noisy” sun producing high geomagnetic activity.47
Besides solar activity, other environmental factors should be considered in working out the best times to send intention. A number of scientists, including Persinger, found that certain days and certain times of day influence the success of ESP and psychokinesis.48 The best results occur around 1 P.M. local sidereal time, which is time measured by our relation to the stars, not the sun. Local sidereal time is worked out as the hour angle of the vernal equinox, where the plane of the Earth’s equator would intersect with that of its orbit, if measured out in the heavens. Psychokinetic effects also seem to be greater about every thirteen days, at times when solar wind is modulated.49
It might also be worth avoiding times of low visibility and high winds, a condition that produces a high percentage of ions with electrical charges in the air. An ion forms when a molecule encounters enough energy to unleash an electron. Ions are also created by rainfall, air pressure, forces emitted during a waterfall, and the friction from large volumes of air moving rapidly over a landmass, as during so-called ill winds, such as El Niño or the Santa Ana of southern California. Both positive and negative ions are equivalent to a tiny pulse of static electricity, and the air that we breathe is made up of billions of these tiny charges.
Good “clean” air contains 1,500–4,000 ions per cubic centimeter, and the preferred ratio should be slightly more negative than positive ions: 1.2 to 1. However, ions are highly unstable; in our industrialized, largely indoor lives, filled with electromagnetic charge from pollution and artificial sources, this ideal number is drastically diminished and the ratio disturbed, leaving all but the most robustly outdoorsy among us inhaling too low a level of ions, with an unhealthy predominance of positive ions. Living without such charges is not particularly good for us—or good for our ability as receivers or transmitters. Research in California and Israel has shown that lower concentrations of either positive or negative ions will produce fewer alpha frequencies in the human brain and that sudden higher levels of either charge can produce rapid, distinctive brain-wave changes.50
Persinger’s research offers a vast amount of evidence that magnetic frequency affects our ability to “tune” in and transmit, and also affects those portions of the brain that receive the information. Subtle shifts in the Earth’s geomagnetic fields most noticeably affect the heart and brain, the very systems of the body shown by the DMILS research and Schlitz’s Love Study to be the primary source of transmission. After examining Persinger’s work, I began to view intention as a vast energetic relationship involving the sun, the atmosphere, and earthly and circadian rhythms. To send intention effectively, we would have to take account of these energies. Persinger had usefully located not only the best “channel” for intention, but also the best time to turn it on.