APPENDIX B
This supplement is intended to provide a brief overview of some of the subjects in this book. It is not intended to be scholarly or comprehensive, but rather it seeks to give the reader some historical sense of selected research that has gone before.
For those of you who are data oriented, there are now many peer-reviewed journals devoted to the investigation of the kinds of phenomena reported here. The most comprehensive is probably the Journal of Scientific Exploration, the publishing arm of the Society for Scientific Exploration, which features articles in a wide variety of areas usually labeled “anomalous.” For readers more specifically focused on healing, I recommend the Journal of Alternative and Comprehensive Medicine and Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing.
These three journals are only the tip of a burgeoning movement within science to finally investigate areas traditionally closed off. Such journals, now too numerous to mention, did not spring up overnight, but rather rest on the research of pioneering individuals who bucked the system to go their own way, oftentimes enduring the scorn of their peers. These include, but are not limited to, York Dobyns, Dean Radin, Roger Nelson, Peter Sturrock, Robert Jahn, Brenda Dunne, and all the prominent members of the SSE.
Despite Western medicine’s rejection of hands-on healing, its underlying principles have been validated in experiments across a wide spectrum of scientific disciplines. These include evidence for the existence of subtle bioenergy fields around living organisms; the ability of conscious intention to influence those fields, and the significance of emotion in heightening effects; the existence of information fields influencing behavior within a species, including the human species; proof that focused intention in the brain of a sender can affect the brain of a receiver; and proof that conscious intention can create physical effects regardless of time and distance.
In conventional science, with its strong materialistic bias, consciousness is considered the spoiler. Whenever it shows up in an experiment, the results are judged to be contaminated because they are subjective rather than objective. However, in recent years this antagonism toward consciousness in the laboratory has come under attack in many disciplines.
One of the founders of the SSE was aerospace physicist Robert Jahn, dean emeritus of Princeton University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, and a member of NASA’s Space Science and Technology Advisory Committee. Jahn was lured into anomalous research through a student project, which seemed to prove that humans could, by intention alone, affect the operation of random-event generators (REGs).
An REG is like a high-speed electronic coin-flipper. Instead of heads and tails, it produces pulses that are converted into 1s and 0s—the language of computers. To test the effects of consciousness on the machine, a human subject attempts to influence the REG to produce more heads or tails than the law of statistics allows. With small samplings, any deviation would be meaningless. However, when the “coin” is flipped two hundred times per second, resulting in millions of responses, even a small deviation from randomness to coherence becomes statistically significant.
That’s what happened with the student project. On the assumption that this positive data must be due to a design error, Jahn kept tightening the protocols to make them foolproof. Nothing changed. The experiments continued to produce a small but replicable and statistically significant correlation between the human operator’s intention and the generator’s output.
Eventually the student graduated, leaving Jahn with these intriguing findings—a classic case of “Gotcha!” Despite being one of America’s top rocket scientists, he relentlessly followed the controversial data by creating the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab. During PEAR’s twenty-nine years of operation, Jahn and his lab director Brenda Dunne, along with a host of incredibly talented researchers, produced an immense database of supporting evidence.
In one benchmark twelve-year study, more than one hundred operators participated in fifteen hundred experimental series, resulting in more than one million trials, employing four kinds of REGs under several distinct protocols. The positive data supporting human-machine interaction remained consistent when the volunteers were thousands of miles from the REGs, eliminating distance as a factor. This consistency persisted even when the volunteers exerted their influence before the machines were turned on. A more startling finding, demonstrated in some eighty-seven thousand experiments, was that volunteers could, through intention alone, affect the findings three days to two weeks after the machines had performed. In fact, these experiments were even more successful. Not only was the future fluid, but also the past!
Human participants often reported a sense of becoming one, or bonding, with their machines. Pairs of operators with an emotional bond dramatically increased the positive results as much as sevenfold. It wasn’t just Albert+Betty=2,
but
Albert+Betty=2++++++
Between 1976 and 1999, the PEAR lab also produced an extensive body of data supporting remote viewing.[1] In 653 experiments, using incisive analytical techniques, researchers produced data confirming the ability of humans to give and receive information-at-a-distance, with a probability against chance of approximately three in ten billion. To achieve positive results, the sender and receiver did not need to coordinate their efforts in time (just as Dave Krinsley and I discovered when we inadvertently sent and received information three hours apart). Something nonphysical seemed to be happening that connected consciousness over both space and time.
In other experiments with REGs, California psychiatrist Richard Blasband demonstrated the effect of emotion on REGs. In 1993, he placed an REG in his office at a distance of ten feet, during a total of thirty-nine therapeutic sessions with eight volunteer patients. The sessions were also videotaped by an unobtrusively placed camcorder to provide synchronized feedback. Analysis of the combined data indicated that the REG distinguished three psychological states: neutral when patient and psychiatrist were merely talking; a greatly elevated REG output resulting in an upward shift on a graph when a patient was angry or elated; and a lowered output creating a downward shift when a patient was crying, anxious, or depressed.
In both the PEAR lab and Blasband experiments, human intent or emotion was the paramount cause of measurable, replicable physical effects. Researchers theorized that an unexplainable resonance between humans and machines had been demonstrated. Through their millions of experiments, PEAR researchers were led to the conclusion that any definition of reality must include the influence of consciousness as an active agent, at least on an equal footing with the senses.
In 1973, the bestseller The Secret Life of Plants documented experiments in which Cleve Backster, a leading U.S. lie-detector expert, demonstrated that plants were affected by human intention.[2] In 1966, Backster had accidentally discovered that his polygraph equipment seemed to be measuring the reaction of the plants in his office to his thoughts and feelings. To test this observation, he decided to threaten the plants by burning a leaf to which he had attached an electrode. The moment he formed that thought, his polygraph’s recording pen registered extreme alarm.
In later experiments, Backster discovered that distance did not affect his plants’ apparent abilities. They picked up his intentions toward them, as their chief caregiver, even when he was hundreds of miles away. To eliminate affecting the plants by his own thoughts, Backster set up an apparatus that randomly dropped live brine shrimp into boiling water when he was not in his office. Again his electroded plants attached to polygraphs registered a sharp reaction the instant each shrimp hit the boiling water. From this and other experiments, he concluded that his plants were in constant communication with all the organisms around them.
Though Backster’s findings were replicated by other researchers, he was predictably ridiculed by the scientific community—an insult reflected in his being singled out for one of Esquire magazine’s 1975 Dubious Achievement Awards: “Scientist claims yogurt talks to itself.”[3] At least Esquire had called Backster a scientist, which other critics refused to do, despite his use of standard laboratory protocols.
About the same time as Backster was experimenting with plants and polygraphs, chemist Robert Miller successfully demonstrated how intention-at-a-distance can affect plant growth. For this he utilized the volunteer services of aircraft engineer Ambrose Worrall and Worrall’s wife, Olga, both famed psychic healers.
On the evening of January 4, 1967, Miller instructed the Worralls to hold in their thoughts some ryegrass seedlings during their usual nine o’clock prayer session. The seedlings were locked inside Miller’s Atlanta laboratory while the Worralls were in Baltimore, some six hundred miles away. For several hours before the experiment, an electromechanical transducer had registered stable growth of the seedlings at 6.25 thousands of an inch per hour. At exactly nine o’clock, the seedlings’ growth began to accelerate. By morning, their growth registered 52.5 thousands of an inch per hour—an increase of 840 percent! When the Worralls were asked how they had accomplished this feat, they said they had visualized the plants as overflowing with light and energy.[4]
As both Popp (page 184) and Backster demonstrated, the organisms they researched were in constant communication with other organisms by means of subtle and sophisticated systems that on the human level would be called “telepathy” or “ESP.”
The idea of information fields, group minds, or a collective unconscious among species has existed on the fringes of biology ever since Darwin introduced his theory of evolution, which was based entirely on mechanistic principles. As evolution’s cofounder, naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, protested: “Material causes alone could not account for the origin of life, the origin of a new species, the creation of human consciousness, or the beginnings of culture.” To bridge these gaps in evolutionary theory, Wallace postulated some “driving, shaping, guiding, designing, or willing force” that could come only from the “unseen universe of spirit.”[5] While Darwin easily won the nineteenth-century debate, throughout the ensuing decades opposition has collected around Wallace’s sense that mechanistic Darwinism is an incomplete system.
In 1953, British biologist Sir Alister Hardy put forth a paper, “Biology and Psychical Research,” in which he suggested that animals might share evolutionary information vital for their development through a group mind that he described as “a sort of psychic blueprint between members of a species.” Hardy also speculated that all species might be linked in a cosmic mind, capable of carrying evolutionary information through space and time.[6]
Evidence for this group mind is particularly striking among insects, as many researchers have independently discovered. With bees and ants, the actions of the individuals are so well coordinated within the group that many scientists refer to them collectively as “superorganisms.” Colonies of harvester ants build radiating roads to food sites half a mile away, and when a road becomes blocked, police ants arrive in a phalanx to construct a detour. Experiments using a stopwatch have verified that these ants appear on-site before an alarm could be relayed by any known sensory or chemical means.[7]
To hide from predators, clouds of tiny coral and green flattid bugs arrange themselves on twigs to look like a single flower with a green tip. When disturbed, the colony instantly reassembles like a well-drilled flash-card routine. How do individual insects learn this trick of coordination? How do they manage to transmit their learning from generation to generation so that the right number of precisely shaded insects—some half-pink and some half-green—continue to reproduce?[8]
British biologist Rupert Sheldrake has attempted to account for these phenomena through his morphogenetic field theory, presented in A New Science of Life, published in 1987.[9] According to Sheldrake, each member of a species inherits an invisible information field (or memory bank or blueprint) specific to its own species, along with its DNA. This memory bank directs the development of the embryo using DNA as physical building-blocks. It also continues to guide the behavior of the organism throughout its life by absorbing and circulating the experience of all members of the species, past and present. Therefore, the more members of a species that learn to do something, the quicker all other members will be able to learn the same task, until eventually it may become genetically fixed.
In the 1920s, psychologist William McDougall of Harvard University exposed thirty-two generations of white rats to a water tank with two escape gangways. The gangway that was brightly illuminated produced an electric shock, while the unlit one was safe. Since he kept changing these about, learning occurred when a rat discovered that illumination always meant shock.
Though it took some first-generation rats 330 immersions, the last learned nearly 90 percent faster. However, he noted “the disturbing fact” that control rats from genetically unrelated stock also upped their learning speeds. When McDougall’s experiments were repeated by F. A. E. Crew of the University of Edinburgh, Crew’s first-generation rats began with the average scores McDougall’s rats had achieved after thirty generations, with some rats performing perfectly without a single shock.
According to Sheldrake, unrelated rats were able to learn a skill with increasing speed simply because other rats had previously done so—an ability each inherited through its morphogenetic field. Sheldrake calls this “morphic resonance.”[10]
My theory of resonant bonding also suggests that bonded organisms have ways of sharing information regardless of distance—as if plucking information from the air—resulting in observable physical effects. Like morphic resonance, this helps explain McDougall’s “disturbing fact” that his control rats seemed to learn at the same time as his experimental ones. Resonant bonding differs from morphic resonance in that it is not species specific. In my experiments, some but not all of the control mice were able to share in the hands-on treatment offered to the experimental mice. Was human consciousness, in the form of intention and empathy, the trump card selectively bonding one group of mice from which others were excluded?
I chose sociology over psychology as a career because I believe psychology, with its overemphasis on the individual, is reductionist sociology. What fascinated me then, and still does, are the social patterns that indicate larger forces at work on human behavior.
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) is often called the “father of sociology” because he studied the processes holding a society together and those causing it to crumble. In his book Suicide, [11] published in 1897, Durkheim demonstrated that suicide patterns in societies were astonishingly regular, which is an observation that holds true today. If you track U.S. suicides by state, you’ll find that Nevada will have three times more deaths per hundred thousand than New Jersey, year after year. You can put in suicide hotlines, take them out, flood the state with psychiatrists, collect the data during peace or war, and it doesn’t seem to matter.[12]
The implications of this can appear quite bizarre. If you find Jonathan standing on a ledge in a hotel in Nevada and you talk him down, have you saved a life, or does this mean you’ve just killed Fred because now he has to jump to make up the state’s annual quota? Most of us reject this view because we prefer to see ourselves acting as individuals rather than as part of a collective. Nevertheless, all human behavior is about interactions. There is no such thing as an isolated individual, unless you were born without parents and never met anybody. If you put two people together, they create a new social entity that is not just the sum of both of them. To use a chemical analogy: if you know everything about hydrogen and everything about oxygen, you still don’t know anything about water, which is what you get when you put the two together.
Durkheim applied that same logic to crime, which he considered a normal and even functional part of society because it reinforced social order among non-offenders. The statistics for crime also remain surprisingly stable, with cities having consistently high-crime and low-crime neighborhoods. Immigrants will typically settle in the high-crime, transitional areas because that’s all they can afford. Let’s say they’re Italian. As an ethnic group, Italians will then be blamed for the high crime rate. When another wave of immigrants moves in—perhaps Puerto Ricans—then the Italians will move into more established neighborhoods, where they will integrate without boosting the crime rate. Now the high crime rate in the transitional area will be blamed on Puerto Ricans.
Crime isn’t a function of one ethnic group or another, or even of conditions that can be easily measured, like low income. Take, for example, Phoenix, Arizona. When you get off the plane, having just left the slush and gloom of a New York winter’s day, the sun will be shining and everyone will be smiling, but Phoenix’s crime rate is out of control because no one lives in Phoenix. It’s a transitional zone in which everyone is just passing through on the way to somewhere else—a circumstance that benefits no one but the real-estate agents. It’s the same with Nevada, which has a high crime rate as well as a high suicide rate. That’s because Nevada is to states what Phoenix is to cities—a transitional zone with little sense of community.
These are the effects of Durkheim’s laws of social order. Because of his groundbreaking work, it’s now standard for sociologists to think in terms of social patterns.
In a 2005 study conducted by researchers from Bastyr University and the University of Washington, EEGs and MRIs were used to see if any correlation could be found between the brain activities of bonded human pairs. When the brains of senders were stimulated, the brains of their receiving partners showed the same brain activity, as if they were seeing the same images.[13]
In a previous EEG study, neurophysiologist Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum of Mexico City discovered that participants with the most-ordered brain patterns were likely to lead their partners into synchronized brain activity, but only if they had previously bonded. In similar studies, it was found that the response of the receiver often anticipated the activity of the sender. These results, cited in The Intention Experiment (2007), by medical journalist Lynne McTaggart, confirm EEG and fMRI experiments in which I affected the brain waves of volunteer receivers when in healing mode.[14]
In summing up the importance of brain coherence, McTaggart stated, “As one scientist put it, coherence is like comparing the photons of a single 60-watt lightbulb to the sun. Ordinarily, light is extraordinarily inefficient. The intensity of light from a bulb is only about 1 watt per square centimeter of light.... But if you could get all the photons of this one small lightbulb to become coherent and resonate in harmony with each other, the energy density of the single lightbulb would be thousands of millions of times higher than that of the surface of the sun.”[15]
My own sense of being able, at intervals, to access an outside power source was also confirmed by physicist Elmer Green, who found that when healers are focused, they exude electrostatic energy, with one producing surges one hundred thousand times higher than normal. He also observed that the pulsations were coming from the abdomen.[16]
Throughout this book, I have mentioned Bernard Grad’s innovative experiments in energy healing. Elisabeth Targ, another colleague with whom I planned to do research before her untimely death, also made a significant contribution to this field. As a psychiatrist at Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, Targ designed a 1999 double-blind study in which experienced healers from across America sent healing thoughts to terminal AIDS patients whom they had never seen. Each healer received only the name, photo, and T-cell count of a patient to be treated. The healer’s instruction was to spend an hour a day for six days sending a healing intention to that patient. Each healer would then receive a new patient until every patient had been treated by every healer.
By the end of the study, all ten patients in the treated group were still alive and in far better condition than the control population, 40 percent of whom had already died. A second study, doubling the size of the experimental group, produced the same decisive results.[17]
In her book, McTaggart describes some of the other “150 studies, varying in scientific rigor,”[18] which have been done on remote healing. Some have used Western healers, some Eastern; some have utilized prayer, some meditators; some have involved groups; and all have utilized intention.
As with my own work, consistent indicators of healing success include: beginning a treatment with a clear intention to heal; an altered state of consciousness; an ability to bring the brain into peak focus; a sense of unity with the person or organism to be healed; a sense of being in touch with an external source of power; and a shedding of the ego in order to get out of the way.
The study of quantum physics—the inner structure of atoms, which make up everything in the physical world—has decisively undermined materialistic science’s claim to present a complete description of reality. Objects are not composed of pellets of matter, as scientists once thought, but of nonmaterial packets of energy called “quanta” or “particles.” Tables and oranges and even people are therefore not material things, but concentrated fields of energy that appear solid only because of the crudeness of our senses.
In the weird inner world of the atom, researchers have discovered that quanta have no ability to act individually, but only as part of a field. If you a shoot a bullet at a target, you can predict where it will strike if you know all the physical factors involved. By contrast, if you propel a particle, it’s impossible to know where it will strike, no matter how much you know about it. However, if you propel a bunch of particles, you can predict a statistical pattern according to the laws of probability. In other words, causes in the quantum world do not produce individual effects. Instead, it’s the interaction of a whole field that produces a probable result.
Quantum physicists have also found that total objectivity in the laboratory, without recognizing the influence of consciousness, is an illusion. For example, if two electrons become entangled in a partnership, one will always spin clockwise while the other spins counterclockwise. What determines the direction of rotation of either particle? The act of measuring it. The physicist’s consciousness creates the result—what is known as the “observer effect.”
Typically, electrons travel in orbits and waves of probability, which offer an infinite number of possibilities. It’s our observation that causes a probability wave to collapse, thus creating an event. This suggests that human consciousness, individually and collectively, creates what we call “reality.”
Once a pair of electrons becomes entangled, they remain so interconnected that they continue to act as one even when separated by space. If a physicist in London measures the spin of one of the pair, determining that its rotation is clockwise, its partner in New York will instantaneously be found rotating counterclockwise, or vice versa. This effect—what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”—occurs no matter how great the electrons’ separation. It has created one of the greatest puzzles in quantum physics: how can a particle know faster than the speed of light the direction of rotation assumed by its partner so that it will always spin in the opposite direction? Once again we have an effect akin to human telepathy.
These findings are not mere abstractions designed to tease the minds of fuzzy-headed theorists. Quantum processes underlie such useful inventions as the transistor, the laser, and the microchip. And since everything in our sensory world, including ourselves, is made up of quanta, it’s reasonable to assume that these principles also operate in the physical world.
Communication-at-a-distance, the power of conscious intention, and quantum-field effects are critical to energy healing. Though these principles have been proven in the laboratory, Western culture has not yet incorporated them into everyday thinking. When we do, energy healing will not seem like such a stretch.