Experiments in Connectedness
Since everything is connected and everything is condensed out of consciousness, it follows that your thoughts can affect anything, not just your biology. Each thought, as we know, sends vibrations through the whole web, and so events in your life, and in the world, which are merely a product of the interaction of things, are also affected.
Most thoughts produce minor vibrations on the web, and these result in minor changes in individual circumstances and in the world. Some scientists have studied this using “random-event generators (REGs)” such as computers that constantly print out random numbers. The idea is that such numbers should always be random. That’s their nature. If you were to show the randomness on a computer screen, you would see a straight line that never changes. However, under certain conditions, it does change.
A 2005 report in the Journal of Cellular and Molecular Biology summarized several years of research conducted by the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Group at Princeton University. A typical experiment would see a person try to make one number appear more often than any other. And it was possible to do so. An average person, for instance, could make, say, an “8” appear more often than any other number.
In 2007, PEAR scientists even showed how intention could make a robot move in a particular direction. Publishing in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, they described how they had converted random events into random directions that a small robot would move in. And they showed that by willing the robots to move in particular directions, people could gradually make the robots move in those directions.
Such studies suggest that we interact with reality every moment, although the effects of our thoughts are seldom noticeable unless we are consciously aware of our role in creating our own personal reality. Usually it takes lots of the same kind of thought to have any kind of noticeable effect. Indeed, when a large number of people are focusing upon the same thing at the same time, the changes are more noticeable. However, smaller changes are often observed with just one person, and I have confirmed this in my own experiments, recording that my intentions frequently give rise to changes around me.
Each thought sends ripples (waves/vibrations) through the universe, just as dropping a pebble in a pond sends ripples outward. A single thought produces a small vibration that is hardly noticeable in the world, but millions of the same thoughts cause a big vibration, like the effect of dropping a huge boulder in a pond. Furthermore, each identical wave adds to another, “resonating” with it and causing a multiplication of its intensity.
Say ten million people heard something on the TV news at the same time and all of them thought, Whoa! That would be ten million people whose minds stopped processing 100 other things and, just for that instant, were focused on the same thing. You would expect this to produce a big vibration. Indeed, numerous experiments have shown that when this type of focusing takes place, a blip appears on the line of the random-event generator. And such is the force of the focusing of millions of thoughts at the same time that the entire web is affected.
Imagine if hundreds or even thousands of people focused on peace at the same time. The thoughts would ripple outward and the effect could be huge. Experiments have actually shown this to be the case.
A paper published in the Journal of Crime and Justice in 1981 described the results of some of these experiments. In a typical experiment, several hundred expert meditators gathered together in a city and meditated, using Transcendental Meditation. FBI statistics gathered over the following year recorded substantially lower crime rates. Similar studies have been conducted in several cities around the world.
In other experiments, presented at the American Political Science Association AGM in 1989, around 7,000 meditators successfully reduced recorded incidences of terrorism and international conflict.
So, peaceful thoughts vibrate outward, affecting the consciousness of people nearby, just as a wave produced by dropping a pebble in a small pond will affect everything floating on the surface of the pond. If millions of people were to focus on peace, then people all over the world might be inspired to behave more peacefully toward each other. With a wave of inspiration traveling through the web, people going about their daily business might just feel different, more relaxed, and peaceful. Others might find their problems resolved, since many of our daily difficulties are products of our chaotic minds. Negotiators in conflict situations might suddenly see the solutions to long-running standoffs. And both sides might suddenly feel less hostile toward each other and see even less meaning in the fighting than they did previously.
All it would take would be for millions of people to focus on peace at the same time on a regular basis. With a “peace budget” as large as a typical corporate advertising budget, visionary leaders could do a lot of good through the media. Imagine seeing the words “peace,” “love,” or “happy” 100 or so times throughout your daily newspaper, or hearing those words regularly on the TV news. Or, instead of full-page advertisements selling products, imagine there was an advertisement suggesting that we be kind to each other today. As more people heard about or read about peace, love, or happiness on a regular basis, the bigger the wave and the larger the effect.
In 2000, some friends and I founded an organization called Spirit Aid. Our original intention was to organize a special event that would inspire more peace, love, and kindness in the world. We hoped that a large mass of people simultaneously focusing upon such values might inspire positive changes all over the world.
The plan was to hold a concert in a large conference center, which we soon scaled up to a soccer stadium, and beam it live on TV all over the world. And the key was that in between musical sets we wanted authors and teachers to speak about peace, love, and kindness. We hoped that the combination of music and messages might produce miracles. During the organizing phase the nature of the event evolved into a 9-day, 24-event festival of peace in July 2002 that sent waves of peace, love, and kindness around the world.
Similarly, on February 9, 2003, the authors and teachers James Twyman, Gregg Braden, and Doreen Virtue organized a peace meditation where a few million people around the world “prayed peace” at exactly the same time, synchronized throughout many different time zones. Shortly after the meditation, there was a veto of the initially proposed UN military action in Iraq.
Peace events like this have been organized around the world for several years. Scientists at Princeton University, running the Global Consciousness Project, have been analyzing them since 1998 to see what effect thousands or millions of people were having on REGs positioned at several locations around the globe. They have proven that peace events do affect the REGs and therefore it is highly likely that they also affect the consciousness of the world.
Some events were organized peace meditations, but several Princeton analyses have been on significant events that have made the news around the world like, for example, the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, or the U.S. Presidential election results, or the opening of the Olympic games. These were times when many millions of people were focused on the same thing at around the same time.
So with each event, the scientists collected REG data and found that, indeed, as many minds around the world learned of the news at around the same time, there were almost always significant changes in the REG data. The coming together of many minds was creating order in the random numbers. To date, over 250 events have been analyzed and the data combined. Overall, the results were highly positive, with odds against them being just a million to one.
Individually and collectively, we affect each other and everything in existence 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Love inspires more love. Peace inspires more peace. Kindness inspires more kindness. Through both our intentions and actions, we change the world. We cannot do anything else. The direction of that change is therefore up to us!
ESP
It is not only random-event generators that show how things are connected. Multimillion-dollar particle accelerators demonstrate the connectedness of tiny subatomic particles over large distances. Using these machines, a pair of subatomic particles can be sent at fantastic speeds in opposite directions. One of them is then probed, and it can be shown that the other instantly feels it.
Numerous simple ESP (extrasensory perception) experiments have also shown that things are connected. In a typical ESP experiment, a person has to guess which of a series of cards is being held up. The symbol on the card might be a circle, a square, a triangle, or wavy lines. Research has shown beyond any shadow of a doubt that “guessers” are aware of which card is being held up.
In 1994 a psychologist named Julie Milton, at the University of Edinburgh, collected and summarized the results of 78 individual scientific studies involving ESP guesses by 1,158 ordinary people that had been published in the scientific journals between 1964 and 1993. Her analysis concluded that the odds against achieving the results by chance were over ten million to one. ESP was real.
If you think about these experiments, the person guessing and the person holding up the card are connected, and so also are the person guessing and the card being guessed. The people and the cards are made of the same stuff and are all part of the web. Therefore, the identity of the card (its unique type of vibration) is available to the guesser, at least on an unconscious level. All that is required is for the information to be “downloaded” from the web onto the personal conscious mind of the guesser, just as information is downloaded from the Internet onto our personal computers. To someone skilled at downloading, it is just as if the card is being held up in full view. As you might expect, some psychics are adept at it.
If we could learn to tap into the collective unconscious at will, thereby “improving our download connection speed,” we would gain some of its knowledge and wisdom. You would, therefore, expect hypnosis to improve ESP ability because it is known to access the unconscious mind.
In 1994, scientists at the NYU investigated this. They analyzed the results of 25 studies that had been published in scientific journals between 1945 and 1982 and indeed discovered that hypnosis improved people’s ability to perform well in ESP studies.
Interestingly, in many of the REG analyses it was found that large numbers of people were unconsciously sensing that something was about to happen. For instance, with the Minneapolis bridge collapse of August 1, 2007, the REGs began to change around an hour prior to the bridge collapse. We should not be so skeptical then when people tell us that they dreamed of such and such a disaster before it occurred. I, for instance, had a vivid dream of an odd-shaped plane with triangular wings taking a nosedive to the ground a short time before a Concorde collided with a building in Paris.
ESP is natural. It is only our belief that it is not possible that obstructs our abilities. It is the same with psychic ability. But anyone can practice ESP or become more psychic. Sometimes in the evening, while I was a university student, I tried to train myself. At first, without practice, I could guess the color of the next card in a randomly shuffled deck of cards maybe four or five times at best, which is what you would expect. But through practice, which involved learning to recognize my intuition, I was able to score consistently higher, and once, with much meditation practice (almost self-hypnosis), I guessed the color of the card 11 times in a row, and with several of the cards I even guessed the suit. I just had a “feeling” about each card.
I am no more gifted than anyone else. Anyone can learn to tap into the collective unconscious, just as anyone can learn to connect to the Internet. In fact, we tap into it all the time.
There is a constant flow of information between the collective unconscious mind and your daily awareness, as you feel every vibration, even though most of the time you are not aware of where specific thoughts, intuitions, and impulses come from. In the same way, a leaf floating on the surface of a pond feels the waves created by different pebbles dropped into the pond in various places, but is unaware of the source of each wave.
In our daily lives, we are often faced with decisions and frequently make a choice based upon what “feels right.” It may be that we feel vibrations regarding the probable outcome of each choice, so we make the choice that we feel is right for us.
Many people believe that angels and spirit guides watch over them and help them with life’s challenges. Some native cultures share such beliefs and, according to numerous surveys, so does a very large portion of Western culture. When I give talks, a quick show of hands often reveals that over 90 percent of the audience share these beliefs.
If you assume that angels and spirit guides exist, then they too must be part of the web, since nothing can be separate from it. But in a universe with consciousness as its most basic building block, it is quite likely that intelligence takes forms other than human. Therefore, it seems quite probable that other intelligent entities could download information to us concerning the best course of action to take. Many people claim to have been so inspired.
I myself had an amazing experience in late 2002. I had created a website for Spirit Aid but then had moved on to other things. My late friend Pat was taking over responsibility for the website and asked if I could give her a disc with the website on it. I didn’t have any CDs to save it onto, so I went to the store to buy some. When I was there, I noticed several packs of floppy discs and I felt a sudden impulse to buy them and save the website onto floppy discs instead of CDs. But I ignored the feeling and bought a pack of CDs because they had larger storage capacity.
When I arrived home, I opened up the website files on my computer, put a CD in the CD drive, and pressed “save.” But it didn’t work. I tried again and again, but I couldn’t get the website to save onto the CD. I tried every CD in the pack but had no success and began to assume that they were damaged in some way.
I had agreed to hand the website to Pat the next morning, so I was beginning to feel a bit concerned that I wouldn’t have it ready on time. Knowing that such a mind-set wouldn’t help, I got up and decided to leave it until later, when I might feel more relaxed.
Since it was a nice day, my partner, Elizabeth, and I went for a drive. We had no idea where we wanted to go, so just kept on driving. Each time we passed an exit from the motorway we wondered if we should take it, but always decided that we should drive on. Turning off the motorway at those times didn’t feel right. Eventually I picked up the map to see if I felt inspired to visit any place in particular. I noticed a small village on the river Forth that I had never heard of before and suggested that we go there.
After driving for almost an hour, we pulled into an empty parking lot on the outskirts of the village. It was like a ghost town and I quite expected to see tumbleweeds roll past. But as we pulled up to park our car, our attention was drawn to something odd. There was a small box lying on the ground in one of the empty parking spaces. I looked at it and, shocked, realized that it was a box of floppy discs. I couldn’t believe it. We were in the middle of nowhere, tumbleweeds (almost) rolling by, in an empty parking lot, in a place that we had picked at random, and there was a box of floppy discs.
I decided not to touch them in case someone had dropped them and was now on their way back to collect them. Judging by the lack of life anywhere, this was unlikely. But we left them alone anyway.
We walked around the village, had some lunch, and returned a couple of hours later, only to discover that the discs were still there. In a way, this was not surprising, as we had only seen about half a dozen people all day, including the two who worked in the café where we had had lunch. But by now I was getting the message. Those discs were meant for me, so I took them.
When we got home, after dinner I decided to have another go at saving the Website onto CDs. I made several attempts and then the penny finally dropped. I was trying to save a file onto a CD when I didn’t even have a CD-writer! I was trying to do it from the normal CD-ROM drive (I had an old computer).
For the previous six months, among my other responsibilities, I had been the designated IT person in the charity office and had encountered just about every conceivable computer problem and software usage that you can imagine. Yet I hadn’t even realized that I needed a CD-writer to save files onto CD. I had needed floppy discs all along.
It was a very large Website, and as I was saving the files the computer kept telling me that each disc had become full. When the website was finally saved, it had taken all ten floppy discs from the box, with absolutely no space left over at the end. I just looked up and said, “Thanks!”
So, coming back to ESP, people receive information from the collective unconscious all the time, because it is not possible to disconnect from it. It seems that the more relaxed and mentally uncluttered we are, the clearer the information we receive. The technique I used in my personal ESP experiments first helped me to relax, clearing some of the mental noise that often obstructs connection. But it also helped me to overcome some residual beliefs that I held at the time that ESP wasn’t possible and so caused me to have more faith that it was possible. And this, I discovered after several more experiments, was the key to my ability. My belief made it easier for me to access information. Faith, I discovered, meant the difference between broadband and dial-up.
Conversely, a belief that it is not possible to connect seems to obstruct the connection and therefore the flow of information from the unconscious to the conscious. This is why people who are skeptical don’t get good results.
A lot of people are skeptical as to whether anything out of their mind-set is possible, and you have probably heard them say, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” But people who have accomplished great things in life will testify to it being the other way around. Ability follows belief. As Dr. Wayne Dyer aptly titled one of his books, You’ll See It When You Believe It.
Sheep and Goats
In 1993, a psychologist named Tony Lawrence at the University of Edinburgh gathered together the results of 685,000 ESP guesses by 4,500 people performed over a 50-year period from 1943 to 1993. They were called “sheep-goat experiments.” A “sheep-goat experiment” is one that compares the ESP ability of people who believe that ESP is possible with that of people who do not.
Lawrence’s analysis of the experiments showed that believers (“sheep”) were much better at ESP than nonbelievers (“goats”) and the odds against achieving such results by chance were a staggering one trillion to 1.
I have conducted a number of ESP experiments with participants at some of my seminars. Typically I will hold up 20 cards, one at a time, and the participants have to guess whether it is red or black. For a while the average score per seminar was about 52 percent correct guesses, where chance would be 50 percent. I wondered what would happen if the participants had a greater belief in ESP, so in the new seminars I began asking the participants to spend five minutes writing down on paper why they should get a good score and to present a case for ESP. The average score per seminar jumped to 57 percent.
This confirms that people who believe in ESP are better at ESP than people who don’t. So the placebo effect extends much further than taking empty pills. People who don’t believe in ESP obstruct their own connection, while people who are open to believe that everything is connected give themselves the ability to gain great wisdom and understanding of life through enhancing their connection. One of the by-products I have noticed is that they also tend to find meaning in their own lives and begin to recognize the contribution that their presence makes to the world.
Belief is a powerful thing. Imagine we believed that the world was a good place, populated by billions of kind and compassionate people. If we did that, we might collectively inspire more kindness and compassion in the world through the waves we created. In fact, as more of us begin to see the world in this way, focusing upon the goodness, our thoughts resonate with each other and multiply the power of the wave.
In the same way, a cynical view, focusing instead upon the smaller numbers of people who sometimes act differently, might inspire unhappiness. But whatever happens can be viewed as positive or negative. It’s how you choose to look at it that determines what you get out of it. We don’t all need to try to change the world. All we really need to do is change our minds about the world. If we view the world as a beautiful place, with beautiful people, and if we are willing to believe in the beauty that we see, then our faith will move mountains!
