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 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.”
