The Intention Experiment

by Cate Montana

On March 11, approximately 400 attendees of the first Intention Experiment conference in central London participated in a pilot Intention Experiment: the first-ever long-distance double-blinded group intention experiment in history. Guided by Lynne McTaggart, the group intended that a simple geranium leaf, picked off a thriving geranium plant at Dr. Gary Schwartz’s office at the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health at the University of Arizona in Tucson, increase it’s photon emissions. In other words, they intended the leaf to “glow.” For the complete experiment description see http://www.theglobalintelligencer.com/mar2007/life-health/intention [1]

The following is an interview with Lynne McTaggart, author of “The Field” and “The Intention Experiment.”

WTB -What's brought you from being an “observer based” journalist to getting involved in creating consciousness experiments and driving the field, so to speak?

LM - I got to this place starting in New York as a New York Times journalist. And it was a series of detours that brought me to England and that ended up getting me involved in writing What Doctors Don't Tell You.: The Truth About The Dangers Of Modern Medicine and then, ultimately, The Field.

The experiments in the field really came about from studying modern medicine and alternatives, and seeing the studies over and over suggesting that things like spiritual healing work. And I kept thinking to myself, “Well, if that's true and you can have one person on one side of the room and sending thoughts to this person on the other side room and have those thoughts make them better, and lot of good scientific studies are supporting this, then something must be very incomplete in the way that we understand the way the world works.” And that set me on the journey to speak with frontier scientists to see if they could tell me anything about how things work in a way that would explain this. And that investigative journey became The Field.

But after writing The Field, I was left with some unfinished business, and the big unfinished business was really about the extent to which consciousness can affect matter. Now I'm a very pragmatic person - not wu-wu at all. And the more I started seeing this material, and these studies, and these experiments being done by scientists all over the world, the more I really wanted to quantify how powerful the effect was. If consciousness makes reality, or if we’re co-creator's, or whatever you want to call it, and mind effects matter, then how far can we go? With a little practice can I stop a train in its tracks? How far can we take this? And what interested me most was the whole idea of group consciousness; how can we actually make the world a better place? I felt there were plenty of people out there talking about personal manifestation. But I figured if this is true and we have all of this power … wow. There's a lot we can do to clean up the world.

So I wanted to test this and really quantify it and gather together many of the scientists I knew and ask them, “Hey, who wants to create a global laboratory?” Because I may not be a scientist, but the one thing I do have is loads and loads of readers. And I can ask them to participate. And even if we had just a portion of them, doing this … sending intention every so often, we'd have the biggest laboratory in the world and we could really find out and discover how powerful our thoughts are. Actually it was just one of those Eureka moments. My husband turned me one day when I was bemoaning the fact that I couldn't find much evidence that was really convincing and conclusive about global or group effects of consciousness, and he said “Why don't you do it yourself?” And that seemed pretty preposterous until I started thinking about what I could offer here.

WTB - In your first intention experiment in March 2006 with Dr. Fritz-Albert Popp in Germany, I believe you said that there was a change in the light intensity of the four targets that your group focused upon, but it showed up as a change of symmetry and cyclical components of photon emission. Could you explain that?

LM - I chose 16 experienced meditators from among our delegates at a conference that year to just check [the potential effectiveness of long distance intention] out. And if anything interesting came of it, pro or con, then I'd put it in the book. Popp measured the deviations [in bio photon emissions] and plotted it all on a graph showing peaks and troughs. And they found that there was a shift over from the mean, and there were also higher peaks and deeper troughs, also a shift over from the mean. So there was a definite demonstrable effect. But based on one experiment, no scientist would say, “Oh, well, this is proof.” But it certainly showed we had an effect. Popp was really surprised. I think he thought it was really a bit ridiculous what we were trying. But he was a good guy and open-minded and said, “I don't know let's try it and find out what happens.”

WTB - It seems counterintuitive that the decrease that was noted in living light, or the photon emissions from the targets, indicated an increase in the health of the targets focused on. Could you explain that?

LM - It's very hard to figure that out, which is why we didn't go for this kind of intention with our bigger experiments. It's just too complex. People might send intention the wrong way round. You see, every living thing dribbles out very tinycurrents of light. As Popp says, “We're all little candles.” But we need just a little bit of light to be healthy. When we have too much light sometimes…when something (a biological entity) is stressed, it sends out more light. Popp believes it's some way of reestablishing our equilibrium in terms of this little energy dance we do with the zero point field. It's hard to know exactly why [bio organisms] do this. But it's like we’re sending out an SOS alert.

Different diseases create different amounts of light also. For example I wrote in The Field that people have less light when they have cancer. It's almost like their light is going out. So a living system that is in good health is just dribbling out a little bit of light which goes up when it's stressed.

It's very hard to make a healthy thing healthier. It's very hard to show it. So we decided to stress all of our targets, all but one, just to see if we could bring [the photon emissions] down a little bit. It was a very crude experiment, that first try. Remember I was walking them through that first intention experiment, standing there with a PowerPoint projector telling them what to do, saying, “We’re lowering the photon emissions, and we're increasing the health.”

WTB – In the March 11, 2007 experiment in London you asked participants to increase the light emissions in a geranium leaf and you chose to do a double-blind experiment? How many people participated?

LM – About 400 people. We were going to do exactly what we did with Popp. But when I spoke with Gary Schwartz (over the phone at his laboratory in Arizona) at the last minute we thought, no, the simplest thing would be to give people instructions to try to make something glow. It’s easy for them to imagine.

All of the scientists say to me, “You’ve got to start on the ground floor. Take it in baby steps. First you have to show an effect.” So the most important thing was to do something crude so we could show an effect. If we show effect, we're talking about doing a germination experiment with some beans to see if we can send an intention to make them healthy and germinate faster.

We'd like to try to actively lower crime rates through intention. The transcendental meditation people have done it through meditation. We'd like to do it through active intent. Or maybe send an active intent to increase learning at a school for learning disabled kids; things we can easily measure. We might try seeing if we can improve hospital statistics one weekend. We're moving on to that kind of group target largely because we want to understand the effect before we start zapping people on an individual basis.

Were going to try cleaning up polluted water; they were going to look at all sorts of things so we have a bunch of really interesting things planned. So were hoping just as many people will get involved as possible.

LM - Remember we are publishing, so we can't give a whole lot of actual statistics because that's the way science works. We have to hold all the statistics for the first publication. But what we can say is that it was demonstrated that there was certainly significant change for the leaf that was given the glow effect intention, over the control leave that was not sent the intention. It seemed significant. There was information we took with both the imaging system (supercooled charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras) and with basically counting up the light. The imaging systems at the University of Arizona give us information in terms of graphs as well as imaging under camera conditions. Our results show we have a significant effect.

LM - I think Gary Schwartz is finishing up the paper for submission, so I imagine it will be months from now. But basically it's quite amazing - the results of the glowing intention were so strong that they could readily be seen in the digital bio-photon images. The increased bio-photon effect was highly statistically significant.

Please let’s be clear that this doesn't mean the effect could be seen with the naked eye. These were tiny, tiny little currents of light only visible in the bio-photon images from the digital system which is designed to pick up light from the far reaches of outer space. Gary and I are trying to be very careful in the way that we present this to the world…the world is waiting out there to trash this. So we have to be really careful and try to keep our scientific credibility.

WTB - So what are the parameters for the upcoming April 14 online Intention Experiment?

LM - We are still deciding, but it will be, once again, doing bio photon imaging. But we’re deciding whether we want to do beans, or do we want to do want a leaf again? We've had a lot of challenges just with the Internet technology. We've got thousands of people wanting to participate, which means you need a big server. So we're getting over some of the technological challenges and that's been one interesting aspect of this whole thing.

WTB – You initially tried an online experiment on March 24 but your site crashed. How many people participated?

LM - We had 11,000 people before it started crashing. We have no idea how many people really wanted to be on. Interestingly enough, a lot of people did send an intention anyway. We found that the results showed a trend in the right direction... in the same direction, we should say. But it's too messy for us to really conclude anything. But it was interesting, and it certainly had a pattern in the same direction which would suggest if we have a clean experiment…. Where there's not a site crash and frustrated people, with some people sending intention and some people sending it 20 minutes later. …

WTB – It’s fascinating realizing what you're trying to coordinate here, getting people to read The Intention Experiment for background and to generate believability, gathering them online for focused instruction, and then online interaction in the experiment.

LM – We’re trying to zero in on the right questions [with these groups]. Do people need to see the photo of the leaf they want to intend higher emissions from as we did at our conference? Or can we just send an intention to the leaf that's been chosen? And of course we'll test those two possibilities.

Gary’s hypothesis is we have to see the photo, but we don't know. Doing a scientific experiment we can't assume anything. Is it important for all of us to be in the same room? We don't know. Can we be far-flung? We don't know. We're testing it. This could be a complete failure. Or we could find that 99 experiments are a failure and then one is successful because we tried doing something a little different. And that's the most important thing about science - just asking the questions.

LM - I guess the biggest surprise was that the Popp thing in March of 2006 actually worked. That 16 meditators could have such an effect and could pick up so much information about the targets. These were not psychics. These are just ordinary people who happened to meditate. And they were picking up so much psychic data about the various targets. But such a strong, clear effect in this March conference really surprised me too.

WTB - You wrote in The Intention Experiment that we have a responsibility for what we emanate. What do you advise people do to take responsibility for the impact they have in the world?

LM - Just start thinking about what they're thinking about all the time. How many people are sending out positive thoughts? If it's true that we are sending and receiving at every moment and we're beaming out information to the world, imagine what we’re beaming out. How many of us walk down the street and don't make judgments just about every minute? Don't mutter about negative stuff all the time? Are just focused on our own negative stuff? And we have to start changing that.

I think there's two things, we have to start really looking at life as a unity, and the universe as a unity. There's no out there out there any more. There is no us and them. It's just us. It's just I. So we need to start rethinking everything. We have to learn a whole new way to be. And one of the ways we can learn is by understanding that we are these constant transmitters and receivers. We have to start sending out more love into the world.

The next experiments are April 14 & April 21 at 5 pmGreenwich Mean Time (1 pm EDT) To participate visit: http://event.theintentionexperiment.com [2]For more information visit www.theintentionexperiment.com [3]