Chapter 8

The Right Place

In 1997, William Tiller had been helping a Californian company develop a product to eliminate electromagnetic pollution. The product contained a quartz crystal, which was why they had consulted him. Tiller, a physicist and professor emeritus of materials science and engineering at Stanford University, had carved out an influential niche for himself in the science of crystallization; he had written three textbooks on the subject and more than 250 scientific papers.¹

The product consisted of a simple black box, about the size of a remote control. Inside its casing were three oscillators of 1–10 megahertz, barely a microwatt’s worth of power when the device was turned on. The box also contained an electrically erasable, programmable, read-only memory (EEPROM) component, unconventionally connected in the circuit. It seemed to be able to screen incoming electromagnetic energy, possibly through the quartz oscillators also contained inside the box: quartz was thought to modulate quantum information by rotating the direction of waves.

As Tiller examined the equipment, an outrageous idea struck him. Fascinated by evidence that remote influence worked, Tiller had been carrying out a number of his own experiments and had formulated an entire theory about “subtle energy” in living systems. Perhaps the little box he held in his hand might help him put intention to the supreme test. If thoughts were just another form of energy, what if he attempted to “charge” this simple low-tech machine with a human intention and then use it to try to affect a chemical process? His experiment would rest on the unthinkable assumption that thoughts could be imprisoned in a bit of electronic memory and later “released” to affect the physical world.² This fanciful idea would lead to a bizarre experimental result, offering convincing evidence that there is such a thing as the right place, as well as the right time, for carrying out intentions.

Tiller borrowed some lab space at the Terman Engineering building at Stanford from one of his tolerant colleagues in civil engineering and some other space in the biology department, made some adjustments to the commercial device, and began designing his experiments. He wanted to go for broke, to see if this “caged” intention could affect actual live test subjects. He realized he could not yet try his experiments on human beings, because they presented too many random, uncontrollable variables. But he could experiment on what scientists consider the next best thing to a human being: the fruit fly.

In the laboratory among the experimental animal population, the fruit fly is prom queen. Scientists have considered Drosophila melanogaster a model organism for more than a century, largely because its life cycle is so short. Within six days a fruit fly will completely remodel itself from larval grub to six-legged, winged insect, and it will die just two weeks later. Tiller had in mind an experiment that would speed up its entire developmental process even further. His Stanford colleague Michael Kohane, an expert in fruit flies, had been studying the effects of supplements of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) on his fruit fly specimens. An important cofactor for enzymes, NAD helps in energy metabolism within cells by transporting hydrogen, which is essential in setting the fly’s built-in timer for larval development. Energy availability also directly affects an organism’s fitness.³

NAD marshals electrons into the pathway needed to maximize energy production and metabolism; low levels of NAD adversely affect the production of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Every cell uses oxygen and glucose to convert ADP (adenine diphosphate) and phosphoric acid into ATP, a molecule that slow-drips energy to power most cellular processes. ADP and ATP are the equivalent of chemical energy storage tanks. Each molecule hoards a tiny supply of energy deep within its phosphorus-oxygen bond. Increasing the supply of NAD will increase the ratio of ATP to ADP, causing the cellular processes to work harder and faster, fast-forwarding larval development. As the fruit fly develops, the higher the ATP/ADP ratio, the more energy available to the cells, and the fitter the fly. The net effect of NAD is to increase a fruit fly’s overall level of health, from cradle to grave.

Electromagnetic fields can have a profound effect on cellular energy metabolism, particularly the synthesis of ATP.⁴ Human thoughts could be construed as a similar form of energy, Tiller reasoned. But could the energy of a thought interact with the transport chain of electrons to stoke up the metabolic fire?

To carry out the protocol he had in mind, Tiller needed a second lab. He set up one near the benefactor who was going to fund the studies in a small facility in Minnesota, just north of Excelsior. There he installed Michael Kohane and Walt Dibble, one of his former graduate students.

One morning in early January 1997, Tiller gathered his four participants, including himself, his wife Jean, and two friends, all highly experienced meditators, around a table. He unwrapped the first black box, placed it in the middle of the table, and turned it on.

At the signal, Tiller told them all to enter a deep meditative state. After mentally “cleansing” the environment and the equipment itself, he stood before them, a tall, lanky figure with bright, irreverent eyes and a wispy white beard, and read aloud the intention he had scripted earlier:

Our intention is to synergistically influence (a) the availability of oxygen, protons, and ADP (b) the activity of the available concentration of NAD plus (c) the activity of the available enzymes, dehydrogenase and ATP-synthase, in the mitochondria so that the production of ATP in the fruit fly larvae is significantly increased (as much as possible without harming the life function of the larvae) and thus the larval development time significantly reduced relative to that with the control device.

Although the intention boiled down to significantly increasing the ratio of the ATP to ADP, Tiller had purposefully made the intention highly specific, so there would be no possible misunderstanding. He suspected that the more specific the thought, the more likely it was to have an effect, and so was careful, with each experiment, to pinpoint its aims. He had added “without harming the life function of the larvae” because he suspected that if they tried to push things too far, they might well kill the tiny creatures.

The meditators held the intention for 15 minutes, before abruptly releasing it, at Tiller’s signal; then they focused for a final 5 minutes on a closing intention, to mentally “seal the intention” into the device.

Tiller had prepared an identical control box that had not been “imprinted” with intention by wrapping it in aluminium foil and placing it in an electrically grounded Faraday cage, in order to screen out electromagnetic frequencies of all magnitudes.

He wrapped the imprinted black box, or the “Intention-Imprinted Electronic Device,” as he now called it, in aluminum foil and placed it in another Faraday cage until ready for shipping. On separate days he shipped each box by FedEx to the Minnesota laboratory, some 1,500 miles away. He had been careful to blind the experiment so that neither Dibble nor Kohane would know which device contained the intention and which the control when the two devices arrived. The Excelsior scientists prepared several groups consisting of eight vials of fruit fly larvae and placed three of the groups of vials inside Faraday cages. They then placed both black boxes inside two of the cages with the vials and turned them on.

Over the next eight months, they carried out experiments on 10,000 larvae and 7,000 adult flies, in each instance tracking the ATP/ADP ratio. After compiling their data and mapping it on a graph, Tiller and Kohane discovered not only that that the ratio of ATP to ADP had increased, but also that those larvae exposed to the imprinted devices developed 15 percent faster than normal.⁵ Furthermore, once the larvae had reached their adult stages they were healthier than normal, as were their descendants.⁶ The intention not only had a positive effect on the flies themselves but also appeared to affect the genealogical line.

By that time, Tiller had tried out other black boxes on a great number of other subjects, choosing his experimental targets with care. He needed tests like that of the fruit fly coenzyme ratio that would show a genuine, measurable change. He decided on two new targets: the pH of water and the increase in the activity of a liver enzyme called alkaline phosphatase (ALP). He chose the pH test because water pH—the measure of acidity or alkalinity in a solution—remains fairly static and tiny changes of one-hundredth or even one-thousandth of a unit on the pH scale can be measured; a change of a full unit or more on the pH scale would represent an enormous shift that was unlikely to be the result of an incorrect measurement. ALP is another ideal test target because its activity proceeds at an unvarying rate.

In both instances, his meditators imprinted intentions into the black boxes to change the pH of water both up and down by a full pH unit and to increase by a “significant factor” the activity of ALP. Tiller then sent off both imprinted and control boxes to Dibble, who made use of a study design similar to that of the fly experiment. Both experiments were extraordinarily successful.⁷ In the water experiments, their intentions managed to change the pH up and down by one unit, and the ALP activity was significantly increased.⁸

Tiller was in the midst of some of his black-box experiments when he noticed something strange. After three months, the results of his studies began to improve; the more he repeated the experiment, the stronger and quicker the effects.

Tiller decided to try to isolate the aspect of the environment that had changed. He took readings of the air temperature, in and outside the Faraday cages, and discovered that the temperature appeared to be going up and down according to a regular rhythm or oscillation, dipping and climbing at regular intervals. He’d first taken the temperature readings with an ordinary mercury thermometer. In case these results had something to do with the instrumentation, he switched to a computerized, low-resolution thermistor-based digital thermometer. Then he tried a high-resolution thermometer. All three recorded the same readings. When he plotted it, he saw that the temperature change was oscillating at a precise rhythm every 45 minutes or so, varying by some 7°F.⁹ Tiller then measured the pH of water in the lab and measured its capacity to conduct electricity. He observed the same phenomenon as he had with the temperature: periodic oscillations of at least one-quarter of a unit on the pH scale, and regular dips and peaks in the water’s ability to conduct electricity. Tiller was especially intrigued by the changes in pH. The acid/alkaline balance in any substance is highly sensitive to change; if the pH of a person’s blood shifts up or down by just a half a pH unit, it means that the person is dying or already dead.

A pattern was developing: as the temperature of the air rose, the pH fell, and vice versa, in near perfect harmonic rhythm. The water’s electrical conductivity showed a similar harmonic cycle.¹⁰ Somehow his lab was beginning to manifest different material properties, almost as if it were a specially charged environment.

The effects also continually increased. No matter which experiment he carried out, the longer the imprinted devices were in the room, the larger the rhythmic fluctuations of the temperature and pH.¹¹ These fluctuations remained unaffected by the opening of doors or windows, the operation of air conditioners or heaters, and even the presence or movement of humans or objects around their immediate vicinity. When he compared graphs of air and water temperature readings, they again mapped in perfect harmony. Every corner of the room that was measured registered the same result. Each aspect of the physical space appeared to be in some sort of rhythmic, energetic harmony.

By this time, Tiller and his colleagues had set up four labs, each separated from the others by between 115 and 900 feet. Once enough experiments had been carried out, every other site also began to evidence these rhythmic fluctuations.

Tiller had never observed these types of “organized” oscillations in his conventional science labs at Stanford. Indeed, they had never been observed anywhere else before. Just to be sure that this phenomenon was not being caused by the boxes themselves, he and his colleagues carried out three control experiments, in which devices that had not been imprinted with intention were placed in the spaces and turned on. In those cases, all the readings of air and water behaved normally.

Tiller still puzzled over the meaning of the effects, and whether they might be due to some physical disturbance. He wondered whether having two large fans in the room would affect the oscillations in the air and water. Ordinarily, forced air convection from a fan should cause oscillations in temperature to disappear. He placed a desk fan and a floor fan in strategic places near a line of temperature probes. Even when fans were turned up high enough to scatter pieces of paper, the original temperature oscillations remained.

What exactly was going on? This could be a magnetic effect, Tiller thought. Perhaps he should check out the magnetic field of the water. He placed an ordinary bar magnet under a jar of water for three days, with the north pole of the magnet pointing upward, and measured the water’s pH. Then he turned the magnet over so that the south pole faced upward under the jar for the same period. When ordinary water is exposed to this kind of weak magnet, which has a field strength of less than 500 gauss, the pH will be the same, no matter which side of the magnet is exposed to the water.

The world as we know it is magnetically symmetrical. Quantum physicists speak in terms of gauge theory and symmetry to explain the relationships between forces and particles, which include electric and magnetic charge. We are believed to exist in a state of electromagnetic U(1) gauge symmetry—a rather complicated scenario where magnetic force is proportional to the gradient of the square of the magnetic field. This boils down to a simple truism: no matter where in a given field you measure the electromagnetic property, you get the same reading. The electromagnetic laws of nature are the same wherever you look.

If you raise the electromagnetic pull in one area, you will find you have changed the electromagnetic pull by the same degree everywhere else. In The Cosmic Code, ¹² Heinz Pagels likens the universe to an infinite piece of paper, painted gray. If you change the color to a different shade of gray or “change the gauge,” you still don’t change the gauge symmetry, because all the rest of the paper will be changed to the exact same shade of gray, so that it is even impossible to distinguish where exactly you are on the paper. A state of symmetrical magnetism is referred to as a magnetic “dipole.”

But the pH of the water in Tiller’s lab was significantly different with one polarity as compared with another, with huge differences of 1–1.5 pH units. Exposing the water to the south pole would send the pH soaring upward, whereas turning the magnet over to the north pole would cause the pH to decrease. At two of his experimental sites, the pH of the water, when exposed to the south-pole polarity, continued to change with the passage of time, peaking after about six days. When the water was exposed to the north pole of the magnet, however, the rhythmic changes in pH that he had been recording dwindled away.¹³

Orthodox science maintains that monopoles exist only in electricity (as a positive or negative charge), but not in magnetism, which creates only dipoles from spinning or orbiting electrical charge.¹⁴ Governments around the world have spent billions of dollars looking for magnetic monopoles everywhere on Earth, without success.¹⁵ Somehow, Tiller had managed to access a magnetic monopole in his crude lab. This phenomenon appeared to be a system-wide effect. In any lab of his exposed to the intention-imprinted black boxes instruments recorded magnetic monopole–type behavior.

It dawned on Tiller that he was witnessing the most astonishing result of all: human intention captured in his little black boxes were somehow “conditioning” the spaces where the experiments were carried out.

Tiller wondered whether this phenomenon would still be present if he altered anything about the space. When he removed one element, such as a computer, the oscillations disappeared for about 10 hours before returning. The arrival of any new materials in his lab also caused the effects to disappear for several weeks, although, once again, they eventually returned. It was as though the space had become an exquisitely tuned configuration, and no disturbance or change would destroy this higher state. Even when Tiller shielded the intention-imprinted devices in aluminium foil and Faraday cages, all the vibrations in water and air temperature continued. One of the sites, a converted barn, recorded oscillating air temperatures on and off for six months; in another site, an office lab, oscillations were recorded for a full year.¹⁶

After the imprinted boxes had been turned on for a while, the effect became relatively “permanent”; the target, whether water pH, ALP, or fruit flies, would continue to be affected even if the device was not in the lab. Tiller decided to see what would happen when he removed all the elements of the experiment. He dismantled the Faraday cage and the water vessels and removed them from his lab, then recorded the air temperature of the place where the cages had been. Even though the experimental vessel was no longer there, his thermometers continued to record periodic oscillations in temperature of 3–5°F. Although this influence decayed very slowly over time, Tiller’s laboratories appeared to have undergone some long-term thermodynamic transformation. The energy from intention appeared to “charge” the environment and create a domino effect of order.¹⁷

The only other phenomena Tiller could think of that had similar effects on the environment were those of highly complex chemical reactions. But all he was working with was ordinary air and purified water. According to the laws of conventional thermodynamics, air and water are supposed to exist in a state extraordinarily close to equilibrium, which is to say that they remain more or less static. These types of results had never been recorded in any lab in the world.

He suspected that he had been witnessing a quantum effect. The constant replaying of ordered thoughts seemed to be changing the physical reality of the room, and making the quantum virtual particles of empty space more “ordered.” And then, like a domino effect, the “order” of the space appeared to assist the outcome of the experiment. Carrying out the intentions in one particular space appeared to enhance their effects over time.

Somehow, in these charged spaces he and his colleagues had managed to create an SU(2)-gauge space, where electric and magnetic monopoles coexisted—similar to the reality supposedly present in the supersymmetry states of exotic physics. In these conditioned spaces, the very law about the proportion of magnetic force had altered. A basic property of physics had completely changed. The only way to get such a polarity effect was to produce some element of SU(2)-gauge symmetry.¹⁸

This change in the gauge symmetry of the space meant that profound changes had occurred in the ambient Zero Point Field. In a U(1)-gauge symmetry, the random fluctuations of the Field have no effect on the physical universe. However, in SU(2)-gauge symmetry states, the Field has become more ordered and produces a number of changes in the tiniest elements of matter—which add up to a profound alteration in the very fabric of physical reality.

 

Tiller felt as though he had somehow entered into a twilight zone of higher energy and that he was witness to a system with an extraordinary ability to self-organize. Indeed, the oscillations he had measured had all the hallmarks of a Bose–Einstein condensate—a higher state of coherence. Up until then, scientists had created a Bose–Einstein condensate only in highly controlled environments and at temperatures approaching absolute zero. But he had managed to create the same effects at room temperature, and from a thought process captured in a rudimentary piece of equipment.

Other scientists have witnessed a similar “charging” of intention space. In one series of meticulous studies, for instance, researcher Graham Watkins and his wife Anita recruited human participants, many known for their psychic ability, and asked them to attempt to mentally influence anesthetized mice to revive more quickly than usual. The experimental mice were drawn from a batch that had demonstrated similar waking times when placed under anesthesia; the chosen group was divided in two, with half acting as controls.

In the first batch of studies, the experimental group woke up about 4 seconds earlier than the controls, a result considered only slightly significant. However, in subsequent studies the wake-up times of the experimental mice improved, and continued to do so with every study.

The Watkinses repeated their experiment seven times. They discovered that the healing had a “linger effect”: if a mouse was simply placed on the spot on a table where another mouse had received a psychic’s intentions, the second one would also revive more quickly than usual. The space appeared to have developed a healing “charge,” affecting anything that happened to occupy that space.¹⁹

Biologist Bernard Grad at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, observed a similar phenomenon during experiments with Hungarian healer Oscar Estabany: once the Hungarian healer touched something—even simple fabric—it appeared to hold a phantom charge. The material could be used successfully for healing in place of Estabany’s healing hands.²⁰

The idea of “conditioned space” was also explored by former PEAR scientist Dr. Roger Nelson at sacred sites. Nelson was intrigued by these sacred spaces and whether their special purpose, or even some inherent quality about the site, had “charged” the space with an energetic resonance that might register on an REG machine. He had run a number of experiments suggesting that a “field consciousness” in a highly charged atmosphere, such as an intense gathering, affected the machines and made them more “ordered.” He carried around a portable random-event generator, to register any changes in the randomness in the ambient field at various sites: at Wounded Knee, the site of the massacre of an entire Sioux tribe; Devil’s Tower in Wyoming; and the Queen’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza. Nelson registered highly significant evidence of increased order on REGs at some sites, as if the location itself contained a lingering vortex of coherent energy, from all the people who had prayed or died there.²¹

Dean Radin used REGs to investigate whether healing can condition the place where it is carried out. He placed three REGs near a culture of human brain cells, then asked a group of healers to send intentions for the culture to grow more quickly, and to engage in traditional space-conditioning meditations. Any deviation from the random activity of the REGs would indicate the probable presence of greater coherence. Radin also prepared a control batch of cells, which were not to be sent intention.

After three days, there was no overall difference in the growth between the treated cells and the controls. Nevertheless, as the experiment progressed, the treated cells began to grow faster. On the third day, all three of the REGs began moving away from random activity and becoming more ordered. The intention of the healers also appeared to have effects on background ionizing radiation.²²

Like Nelson’s readings at sacred sites, Radin’s experiment offers tantalizing hints about the nature of the “linger” effect of intention. The REGs’ registering of movement away from randomness to greater order implies that the Zero Point energy of empty space has shifted into a state of greater coherence. The “charge” of intention may have a domino effect on its environment, causing greater quantum order in empty space, which would enhance the effectiveness of its aim.²³ Russian scientists have observed a similar phenomenon in water, which retains a memory of applied electromagnetic fields for hours, even days.²⁴ The effect is like that of a laser: when waves of the ambient Field become more ordered, an intention may ripple through it like one powerful, highly targeted bolt of light.

With magnetic monopoles, Tiller was out on a ledge shared by few of his colleagues, even in consciousness research. His studies needed to be replicated by other, independent laboratories. But if his body of work does stand up over time, it will demonstrate the extent to which the energy of human thought can alter its environment. The ordering process of intention appears to carry on, perpetuating and possibly even intensifying its charge.

The strange, almost unbelievable events occurring during Tiller’s experiments made me wonder whether setting aside a particular room for carrying out intention might be an important consideration. Perhaps we each need our own “temple” to which we return, if only in our mind’s eye, every time we send a directed thought.