Theatre of the Mind Podcast Episodes

The Intention Experiment

Kelly Howell: Welcome once again to "Theater of the Mind, " your host, Kelly Howell. Well, I've been quiet for a while, I know. Everybody needs a break now and then, but I'm back, and starting now, we will be posting podcasts regularly. Today, we're going to explore the science of intention, and our guest is Lynne McTaggart. Lynne is a bestselling author and an awardwinning science journalist. She is the author of five books, one of which we explored in a previous show, called "The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe."
Her latest book, "The Intention Experiment", is a groundbreaking exploration into the science of intention. In her book, she draws on the findings of leading scientists and demonstrates that thoughts can affect matter. From these findings, she explains we can use our thoughts to improve our life, help others and change the world.
Lynne, welcome back to "Theater of the Mind."
Lynne McTaggart: Thank you very much. It's nice to be back.
Kelly: It's great to have you here. How is it in London?
Lynne: It is beautiful and sunny, I have to tell you.
Kelly: How funny. So we don't have rainy London; guess what, we have rainy Santa Fe.
Lynne: Oh, I can't believe that, my goodness. Oh, our weather, I don't like to say this, but our weather is really improving.
Kelly: Isn't that odd?
Lynne: The global warming so.
Kelly: Ours is too here in Santa Fe, because we're in the desert, and now we have rain almost everyday which is kind of odd. [laughter]
Lynne: Very strange.
Kelly: Let's get into your book. I love "The Intention Experiment." What was your inspiration for writing the book?
Lynne: Well, it was a little bit of leftover business, I think, from my other book, "The Field." I mean, for that book, I had kind of done well, I suppose you could call it a confidence trick. I convinced my publishers to let me go on a journey, and it was really a voyage without a compass because I had been very interested in the work that I do, and I read medical literature all the time. And I look at what works and what doesn't work in conventional and alternative medicine for my newsletter, "What Doctors Don't Tell You." And, in the course of that, I kept coming across studies of spiritual healing and acupuncture, and those types of things, demonstrating that this stuff works. And, I kept thinking to myself, well, that's true; if it's true that one person sitting one place can send a healing intention to another person, and that other person gets better, then there is something in the way the world works and the way we work, that in our understanding, that's incomplete.
So, I set off with this confidence trick to find out what that was. I had no idea what I was going to find, and I really was on a journey of exploration. And what I discovered, I guess, was a new science in the process of unfolding.
And what was amazing to me was that the science as we knew it, our story of how our world as we knew it, was in the process of falling apart. There was a new scientific story being developed really right before my eyes.
And so, the leftover business I talked about earlier was just that there was a lot of evidence from this work, from these experiments of these scientists demonstrating that consciousness, mind, has the ability to affect matter, physical matter.
And so I, being the very downtoearth person that I am, you know, nothing much woowoo about me, wanted to find out how much of an effect can we have. And, if there are lots of us having an intention at the same time, does that make the effect any bigger? What can I do with this in my life and what do intention masters do? So those were all the questions I set off to answer with this book.
Kelly: Well, and you certainly did, it's a great book.
Lynne: Thank you very much.
Kelly: How does the book's central idea, that consciousness affects matter differ from classical physics?
Lynne: Well, classical physics, as defined by Isaac Newton, our physics, our science as we now understand it is over 300 years old. And we rely on Newtonian physics, which is a description of a very well behaved universe. In Newtonian physics, the only way one thing can influence something else is if that first thing gives the second thing some sort of does something physical to it. It's something requiring force, and that means it needs to burn it, freeze it, drop it or give it a swift kick. That kind of physical effect is what we expect influence to be all about; otherwise, we think of our universe as a collection of wellbehaved objects that are very selfcontained, they're isolated and selfcontained. And they're sort of finalized assemblages as we see them.
So, we see them they are not just 'influenceable'. They come as they come. And the new physics shows that that's not true, that the world is actually highly mutable and 'influenceable' and that things are influencing other things all the time. Light is being emitted from one thing to another thing and influencing it at every moment. And I think that's the thing that's really astonishing, is that there is this subtle influence of the one on the other all the time.
And, also, we think of ourselves as occupying a world of discrete and separate things and the new science is showing us that that's not true that, that actually, we are all part of one giant thing, one energy field. And we're all part of this, and the one part is having an influence on the other part at every moment.
Kelly: We're all connected.
Lynne: That's it, we're all connected.
Kelly: What does the observer effect in quantum physics suggest about the nature of reality?
Lynne: Well, in quantum physics, and this is the science of the small as current physicists describe it. Every quantum physicist knows there's a thing called "super position, " which means that, basically, it means that a quantum particle doesn't exist in any set state. It's all possible states all at the same time. And this is very frustrating, and weird, and counterintuitive. So, it's not a set thing yet, it's only a potential of a thing. And what they've discovered is, when somebody, a scientist, looks at an electron, or some other subatomic particle, or takes a measurement, that potential of something, that all possible selves something, turns into a single self, turns into something real. And so, from that, many scientists infer that somehow the observer we have an effect on reality. That somehow we are cocreating our reality and it doesn't just exist out there independent of us, but that we are actually making it every time we look.
And so, this is what a lot of people are understanding, and also finding out in experiments that we are having this effect. They're demonstrating that there's a subtle effect that we have at every moment.
Kelly: Well, what did your research on your early intention experiments reveal about this?
Lynne: My early intention you mean the ones that we've carried out online?
Kelly: Mmhmm.
Lynne: OK, well, I should explain a little bit about that. I decided, as I say, I was very interested in the whole idea that if one mind has an effect, then lots of minds have an even bigger effect. And so, I wanted to find out a bit more about this. But, when I looked at all the data, I couldn't find a great deal of information about that. It was tantalizing and interesting but not conclusive. And so, my husband turned to me one night and said, "Well, why don't you do these experiments yourself?" And I thought, well, that's completely preposterous because I'm not any kind of a scientist, I'm a science writer, but the last time I did an experiment was something like the 10th grade.
So, I started thinking about it though and I realized, I know a lot of scientists through the field who I think would be happy to do this and I also have one thing that scientists don't have, which is thousands and thousands of readers. And, if I can invite them to come online and send intentions at some certain point we would have one of the largest global laboratories in the world. So, that's what we are doing.
We've started doing both big scientific intention experiments where we run them periodically, where I invite the readers to come on the site and to send intention to a particular target. Then we've measured the effect.
Then I also am doing weekly intention experiments where the readers are nominating people who need some intention, who have something negatively happening in their life, a health challenge, or something like that. We're sending intention to them and having them keep a diary. Those are more informal intention experiments.
But with our big intention experiments I guess the most exciting one was the first one we did at our intention experiment conference. We had 400 people there, and we were working with the University of Arizona, and Dr. Gary Schwartz. He set up an experiment with a control, so we had two leaves and we decided to measure the tiny light emissions coming out of the leaves. We know that all living things send out a tiny current of light all the time.
Kelly: Are those biophotons?
Lynne: They're called biophotons, that's right. These things can be affected very easily by all sorts of things; stress, or illness, or a number of things. We wanted to see what would happen if we sent intention to one of them.
Kelly: How do you measure biophotons?
Lynne: Well, Gary has some really amazing equipment. He has very sensitive CCD cameras, the kind of cameras that record very faint light in outer space. The scientist there chose two leaves that were very similar in biophoton emissions and unbeknown to the scientist, our audience chose one of the two leaves. We sent intention to it, and our intention was to make it glow. We wanted to increase the biophoton emissions. So, we sent that intention. Gary then put both the leaves, his scientist then put both the leaves in his special CCD camera equipment, which not only photographs the leaves as they are, very sensitively to pick up any sort of light, but also counts photon by photon.
We found that the leaf sent intention, in every way had a significant increase in biophotons. You can actually see it in the special imaging equipment, it's truly glowing. We were really amazed by that, it was something bigger than we even expected.
Then we tried it with all of the readers and more than 7,000 participated, sending intention to seeds. We did the same kind of experiment, and we found again that there was more light in the beans that had intention.
Kelly: Did they send intention at the same time?
Lynne: Oh yeah, they're all sent intention to our website. We had all people coming on the website at exactly five o'clock Greenwich Mean Time. That's like the equivalent of noon Eastern Standard Time. We asked everybody to come onto our site, and they actually saw an image of the leaf, a live refreshing image of that leaf, or the beans in this case, and we asked them to send intention to those beans, and they did. We then calculated the difference. We had people from 30 countries participating. It was quite amazing. Every week, even with our informal intention experiments, we've got thousands of people online sending intention.
Kelly: What's your definition of an intention? How does one hold or send an intention?
Lynne: Well, that was one of the things I wanted to find out in my book. When I first started I thought of an intention as a very forceful mental oomph. The only way I can think of it is, my daughter was playing the other day, she was playing a special tournament. My youngest daughter is very sporty. She plays, over in England where I am, rounders, which is like baseball. She was playing rounders and whenever she was throwing the ball, or batting, I would be sending a mental oomph, just hoping she would catch that ball, hoping she would whack the ball out of the park. You know, that kind of mental oomph where you're really concentrating on something. But I've come to think that actually intention could also be when you're not paying much attention and it's just the flotsam and jetsam going through your mind at the same time become, in a sense, your life's intention. Having said that, I believe there are a lot of conditions that really increase your ability to send intention. That's what I was looking at in the book.
I wanted to prove that there are certain times, there are certain places, there are certain mind states that are helpful, there's a sense of compassion and making a connection with your subject. There are a number of things like that that make you a better intender. I gathered this from studying intention masters. Like Buddhist monks, and Chi Gong masters and healers, and also studying the evidence in the laboratory.
Kelly: Interesting, so what has the process of biofeedback taught you about the energy transmitted by the mind?
Lynne: Well it's taught me that virtually any aspect of the body, any physical process, can be affected by the mind. I mean, biofeedback is quite amazing. It uses equipment to ring an alarm bell to the body, to tell the body that it's in a certain physiological state. So let's say you've got Raynaud's syndrome, your extremities get very cold and blue. If that happens, and you're hooked up to biofeedback equipment, it gives you a sense that it's time to send an intention to warm up your hands. They've shown over just countless studies that this works, and there's pretty much every part of the body that you can affect with intention. There are even demonstrations that you can affect certain brainwaves with intention. Even animals can be taught to do this. It just demonstrates the degree to which we have mental control over our own bodies.
Kelly: In your research did you find that there are particular brain states that affect our ability to send out intentions, like alpha or theta?
Lynne: Oh, that's an interesting question because I assumed that it was a brain slowed down. The alpha state is very much a brain slowed down. It's the state we have with light dreaming or meditation. By alpha they mean cycles per second that are slower than ordinary beta of waking consciousness. What I found when I looked at actual studies of Buddhist monks, and champion remote viewers like Ingo Swan, was that their brains weren't slowing down. They were actually speeding up during intention.
For instance, with the Buddhist monks, when they're in a state of intention, and Buddhist monks are the kinds of people who can send intentions to change their metabolic rate by 60%, or their temperature by 17%. It is quite amazing what they can do. But during those states, they're not slowing down, their brain is speeding up, and it's in a state of rapt attention.
The kind of attention that is pretty much like when you're attentive with every pore of your body. They move into a gamma state, where the brain is actually moving faster, more cycles per second, far more than beta state, ordinary consciousness.
Kelly: Yeah, that's a very high frequency. But what's interesting about it is that the gamma waves actually occur after the calm, quiet theta meditation.
Lynne: That's right.
Kelly: They arise out of that.
Lynne: Exactly, you slow down to speed up. Then what happens is you slow down to focus. And then the focusing takes you into hyperspace. This is what I've tried to do in my book, too. I created a program I call powering up because that's what you're doing. You are entering hyperspace.
Kelly: Or superconsciousness, right?
Lynne: Sorry?
Kelly: Or you're entering super consciousness when you go into the gamma. Sort of like a high frequency, inspiration, kindling, connection with a higher consciousness.
Lynne: Exactly. That's exactly where you want to go. So you need to start working on high degrees of focusing. How do you focus to that degree?
Kelly: What other things can help us become better intenders?
Lynne: There are also things about the right place. I was fascinated to look at a number of studies demonstrating that healing effects occur faster and better when, in the laboratory, they're using the same lab and equipment over and over again. It's almost like a sacred place gets created.
Kelly: Creating a pattern or a habit, a time and a place?
Lynne: Well, it's more with the place. There seems to be some sort of vortex of energy that gets created. William Tiller does a lot of work like this. He actually tried to embed intention in a little black box, an electronic device, and then turn it on and try to affect some sort of chemical process that way. He has had a great deal of success. When he's measured the physical space afterward, using a lot of different measurements, like temperature et cetera, he sees big weird changes there. He has interpreted this to mean that you're reaching a different reality through this repeated use of intention.
The easiest way of saying that is, that ambient field we talked about, that everybody's a part of, becomes more ordered some how. And so that may be one other mechanism that's happening during intention. What I can tell you, for certainty, is that there are many studies demonstrating that healing, that intention, when you carry it out in the same place over and over again, it seems to work faster and better.
And so from that, it seems to me, it's a very smart thing to do when you're going to do intention, carry it out in the same place. Or even mentally go travel to that space if you are not there when you're trying to send intention. Travel to that space to send your intention.
Kelly: I wonder if Dr. Gary Schwartz has measured the biophotons in this space of somebody's...
Lynne: Whether the biophotons have changed, that would be an interesting question. Are they sending out more? Usually you have to measure it around a living thing. Certainly we know there are many changes in things like water after you send loving intentions. That they've measured. It's not called biophotons, it's called photonic emissions, and water certainly has it. They found a big change after loving intention is sent. There are certainly many things like that, demonstrating changes with intention.
Kelly: I remember when I first learned to meditate, my meditation teacher said, "Always sit in the same place, because the energy will gather there, and it'll become easier for you to meditate." It's a similar thing to what you're talking about.
Lynne: Absolutely. Your meditation teacher understood intuitively what these scientists are proving.
Kelly: How do geomagnetic fields affect intention?
Lynne: That's an interesting thing about the right time to send intention. This is really interesting to me because what I discovered a lot of work being carried out by a guy called Michael Persinger in Canada. He carried on the work of some other people, including a fellow called Franz Halberg, who discovered that there are certain biological rhythms that carry on and repeat over and over again. When he looked to the source of it, he discovered it wasn't inside the organism, but externally it was actually being caused by the sun. The reason the sun has this profound effect is because the sun is this really crazy, furious star. We think of the sun as this benign thing out there giving us light, but it's actually a giant ball of gases, that's throwing stuff at us all the time. It's hurling solar flares, and coronal mass ejections, and all kinds of gaseous things at us at just unbelievable speeds. What we think of as this uneventful vacuum of outer space, is actually a maelstrom of this energy. It's so turbulent that if it were transferred to our planet, it would blow up the Earth in an instant.
That kind of huge and crazed activity going on in outer space effects when the sun is very noisy, and sending out a lot of these solar flares, it effects the geomagnetic shield surrounding the Earth. What many of these scientists have discovered is those changes in geomagnetic activity have profound effects on living things.
For humans, they have particular effects on the heart and brain. We've also discovered, they also have huge affects on psychic activity and intention. The easiest way to look at it is, when geomagnetic activity is calm, not much is going on, you are actually more psychic. You pick up intuitive information much more. When the Earth is noisy, when there's a lot of geomagnetic activity going on, then that actually aids intention.
Kelly: Interesting. Now I have to ask you this question, Lynne, because I know everyone is going to be asking. Where can we find out what's going on with the Earth's geomagnetic fields? Is there a website?
Lynne: There certainly is. There is an American organization called NOAA, which is a national oceanography organization that monitors this. They track space weather, and that's what it's called, space weather. They've got environmental satellite operations. They give all kinds of data. They can give you information about whether or not there are noisy, or things are... if there are storms in outer space.
Kelly: Can they give you a fiveday weather report?
Lynne: Yeah. It's like a space weather report. One of my friends says I'm the only girl he knows, when I want to find out what the weather is doing, I check outer space.
Kelly: [laughs]
Lynne: It's noaa.gov. It's the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and it's run by the U.S. government. They have information all the time about today's space weather. You just need to go there, and go to a link about space weather on that site.
Kelly: Also, when you did your intention experiments online, did you check that site and pick an ideal time?
Lynne: Our first intention experiment, I had to organize my experiments months in advance. I have to pick dates where the scientists can do them. My first intention experiment, I tried a pilot study with a scientist in Germany. When we went to do the experiment, it was in the evening, I picked 16 meditators and we all decided to do it together. I wanted experienced meditators so they could power up fairly easily. I was just testing out this whole thing. We were in London, England. They were in Germany, the scientists and the targets. The night of the experiment it was hailing. We had to actually take shelter in a doorway for a while. I realized to myself, "Oh, this is pretty good. If there are this many strange atmospherics going on, it probably means that the space weather out there is pretty unsettled, this is going to help our intention." Sure enough, I looked later and it was. The experiments that we've run to date have had medium space weather. We've had some effects, which are great. Also, space weather, in general, is getting to be more turbulent, which is really good news for intention.
Kelly: That's very interesting. Are there different ranges that you've found when one goes on this website?
Lynne: Yeah, there are many big ranges.
Kelly: What's the ideal?
Lynne: It's measured by AA, or K. It will say unsettled or more. It goes everywhere from very calm to extremely turbulent, where there are such huge storms in outer space that they disrupt satellite equipment, they disrupt power, all sorts of things. They can throw off airplanes, all kinds of things like that. Anything that is just slightly unsettled is good.
Kelly: Not just completely calm? [laughs] Or is there such a thing?
Lynne: [sarcastically] Completely calm, right. If you have a really important intention, the point is wait until it is a little bit unsettled, it's better.
Kelly: Are there any other tips that you can share with us about becoming better intenders.
Lynne: Yeah, well one really important thing is to make a connection with someone. A lot of people think about sending intention to somebody blind, or whatever. But it's important to make some sort of connection. This is an important thing for healers. It is commonly assumed that a healer can have an effect on anybody. Well, they probably can. But the evidence demonstrates that when you make some sort of connection with your patient or with the person you're sending intention to, you hold their hand, you make some sort of human connection with them, or living connection with them in the case of pets, or a plant or whatever, then you're going to have a bigger effect.
Many studies of healers have demonstrated that when there is that kind of connection, they have a much, much more profound effect on the healing. Another important thing is to try to hold your big intentions for when you are feeling healthy and well in every way.
Dr. Schwartz had some very interesting data showing healers had a very variable effect, and when he analyzed it and he started asking them questions around themselves, he found that days when they weren't feeling so well or they weren't in a particularly good mood, if they were upset about something, they didn't have as good an effect.
So, in a sense, healers have to be coherent. And there are even other studies demonstrating healers and prayers, people doing praying, have a better effect when they, themselves are prayed for. So, it seems to be the case that the healer, when the healer is healed, the healer has healed the healee.
Kelly: I was going to ask you about the connection. Now, what if you are doing something from a long distance?
Lynne: Time or space, strangely enough, are absolutely irrelevant here. And that's the thing that's interesting. That's why I wanted to do these intention experiments. Remember, we're having people send intention all around the world, to a target at the University of Arizona, or one time we're going to do it in St. Petersburg, Russia, and another time in Petaluma, CA with the Institute of Noetic Sciences. So, it's always a distance. And the people are from as far away as Australia, and as close as around the block. So there's all kinds of intention being sent. But in the studies of looking at distance, they've found that with their experiments, there are experiments where people have tried to influence another living system, or experiments where people have tried to affect some sort of machinery, it just didn't matter how close or far away they were. It had the same effect whether they were sitting next to the thing or person, or whether they were 3,000 miles away.
Strangely enough, it also didn't matter whether or not they sent the intention that minute, or three days ago, or three days hence. Time and space were irrelevant.
Kelly: Beautiful. Is there any difference between an intention, and a wish, and a prayer? Or are we talking about the same?
Lynne: I think so, in this sense. I think a prayer, when you say a prayer, I think there's a subtle difference in the sense that you are asking some sort of entity outside of yourself for permission. You are a supplicant, and you are saying, please will you do this one for me? Whereas intention, I think, originates from you. You are the creator, and you are very conscious of being the creator. Having said that, you also believe you're part of something larger, and I think all of the intention masters, the people who are effective, kind of put out their intention, and then they ask or they look to a greater consciousness to take over.
So, I think it does originate, I think there's a subtle difference here; that when you are investing the outcome totally in an outside force, it's really do God's will kind of thing. Thy will be done, whatever you think is OK. So, it's not necessarily saying I would like this outcome. So, I think that there is that. And it's also saying, this is originating with me, but I am joining forces, I am hooking into the universe to do this.
Kelly: So, it's personal will, would you say?
Lynne: It is a personal will, but I think it is something more spiritual than that, I think.
Kelly: Because you are connected.
Lynne: I think it is also, I think it's more conscious and it's also more practiced. I think that there are all of these conditions. I don't think that it's about just sitting down and having happy thoughts. I think some people are going around thinking intention and manifestations are, oh, I'll just manifest myself a really happy life here. I think that while positive thoughts are really important, I think it is a lot more complicated than that.
Kelly: Yeah. Well, in the book, you discuss good intentions and bad intentions. Does one have more power to affect matter than the other?
Lynne: I really wish I could tell you that positive intentions are more powerful than negative intentions, but I just can't. The evidence I've looked at shows that negative intention can be just as powerful.
Kelly: Oh, that's awful.
Lynne: That's really surprising for all of us, because we like to think that the good guys are more powerful and they win. But having said that, the people who tend to show that negative intention works very, very well are people who are very coherent and organized individuals, Chi Gong masters who are able to use negative killing intention.
Kelly: Wait, can we back up? What is negative killing intention?
Lynne: Well, remember, experiments that have been done with negative intention, they can't have an experiment having somebody send an intention to kill somebody else, or an animal or whatever. So they have to work on pretty benign things like bacteria. And they've had Chi Gong Masters send positive and negative intention to things like bacteria, or to make a part of a plant grow, or retard its growth. They found that the power of the negative intentions work just as powerfully as the positive intentions. Among somebody that practiced, as I say most people who are negative are all over the place. They're not quite so coherent so they may not have quite as...
Kelly: Clarity and coherence. OK, this brings me to my next question. Do negative intentions backfire? If someone is wishing harm to another person, or even to the bacteria, does that affect the intender? Do they study that at all?
Lynne: That's a very interesting question. I would have thought that the people who are carrying hate around, and sending intention are poisoning themselves, it's pretty toxic.
Kelly: Yeah, I interviewed a remote viewer, I think it was Paul H. Smith, who was experimenting with negative remote viewing or, I can't remember what it was exactly that he was doing. But he got really ill.
Lynne: Really?
Kelly: Oh, yeah.
Lynne: Yes. I'm sure that can happen, you know? So, I think that it is a good message for any of us anyway, is that we have to be a little more conscious of what we are doing, because how many of us are walking around with positive intentions all of the time? How many people are walking around with no judgments of other people when they see them on the street, and not sending some sort of negative idea out there?
Kelly: I hope somebody does that research, because it would be good to know.
Lynne: That would be interesting. I wouldn't be surprised.
Kelly: What are some successful examples of professional athletes who've used intention?
Lynne: Well, I thought that was really interesting, because I was trying to look at methods where the intention is used in real life. My investigation brought me to sports, because all elite athletes now are using a thing they call mental rehearsal. And they, by that, they imagine themselves doing whatever they're doing, they're going to do, the match or whatever, in real time as though they were doing it; as though they were carrying it out. So it's not like watching themselves in a video, they are imagining themselves engaged in the process, and they are feeling it with their five senses in real time. The reason they do this is they've discovered that basically the brain is kind of stupid, and that the brain, for all the marvel that it is, it can't distinguish between an action and a thought.
So the thought of something, the thought for instance of carrying out a match, activates the same muscles and muscle configurations as it would if you were carrying out the activity yourself. And so all that does is it creates a physical rehearsal as well as a mental one. So your body, it's almost like laying down track in a wild country.
You know, you're laying down a train track and then the train can ride through. Once these connections have been made, it's very easy and quick for the body to make them in the real activity.
Now, when I was looking for examples of people who were really carrying this out, I was astonished to see that one of the greatest proponents of this was actually Muhammad Ali!
And I'm fascinated to look at that, because when you really study Muhammad Ali, He was a master intender.
Kelly: I'm the greatest.
Lynne: Biggest and best affirmation that has ever been created, "I am the greatest".
Kelly: Yep.
Lynne: Look at his little rhyming couplets and quatrains. When he was...
Kelly: Oh, that's right.
Lynne: ...wrote poems. He would...
Kelly: He made affirmations, kind of.
Lynne: Exactly.
Kelly: Yeah, what were some of his? I don't remember them.
Lynne: Well, and they were very specific intentions. It would be things like "Archie Moore is going to hit the floor at four." [laughter]
Lynne: That was basically a prediction. Very specific prediction. Archie Moore is going to hit the floor, and sure enough, Archie Moore usually did hit the floor in the fourth round.
Kelly: Wow!
Lynne: And he did that. He did all kinds of mental rehearsal. He even one time used a voodoo doll. In the killer in Manila game, that was one of his other comeback fights...when he was fighting George Foreman. He used to walk around with a little gorilla in his top pocket. It's very, very racist and horrible, but very, very effective, it has to be said. Every time he saw a journalist, he'd pull this little gorilla out and he'd start punching it. And he'd go... He'd be punching away at it and he'd say, "It's going to be a chiller and a killer in Manila when I get the gorilla."
And, he'd be punching away this little gorilla and by the time they got to the fight, Foreman had been reduced in his own mind to something less than human.
Kelly: So that was kind like a negative intention there, huh?
Lynne: Won the fight, Ali won the fight.
Kelly: Yeah, yeah. So do you think rhymes are good for intending?
Lynne: Well, I think what's really to be brought away from that is looking at all the techniques, not to say we all ought to go out there and start beating each other up, but I think...or, you know...
Kelly: Well, for positive results...I mean, we're not Muhammad Ali, but just that concept of having a rhythmic pattern in your mind that you repeat over and over again like a mantra.
Lynne: Exactly. He created his own little mantras. Highly specific intention. And I think that's what you take. Ali and all of these elite athletes are using highly specific intentions, and I think that's another thing, too. We think of oh, you know, happy thoughts. Once again, it needs to be if you want to do something by day three and a half, you should be specifying by day three and a half. This is what you want to be doing, and keep sending those intentions out. Very specific intentions. Repeat them over like a mantra and be highly specific and mental rehearsal.
People like Tracy Caulkins, one of the greatest American swimmers who's ever lived, beat someone else in the 1984 Olympics by doing a mental rehearsal that she was going to dive in to the water two hundredths of a second early.
And that's, you know...
Kelly: Wow.
Lynne: ... highly specific intention. That kind of thing. And then the mental rehearsal. Other people Rocky Bleier, he was in the Pittsburgh Stealers, a famous football player. He said in his autobiography that he would mentally rehearse every single move they had practiced. Over and over again, over and over again; on the bench, eating his cornflakes. Over and over again, until he got to play on the field.
And then his body was prepared, because as I say, the brain can't distinguish between an action and a thought.
Kelly: And it's actually, I think, the subconscious. I mean, Candace Pert says the subconscious is in every cell of the body. We had Bruce Lipton on the show, and he called the subconscious a stimulus response tape recorder. And that the stimulus you put into it, it responds to, so your body will react.
Lynne: Yes, exactly. Exactly! Your body gets the message, it is given the message, and that's the thing, you want to just keep repeating this message if it's some kind of activity, the body has this information and then can act more quickly.
Kelly: And the rehearsal it's not just thought. It's engaging all the senses right?
Lynne: Exactly. That's what we're talking about.
Kelly: It has to have feeling.
Lynne: You have to have feeling, and also, literally, the five senses. You are doing this, you are imagining it. Let's say it's sport. You're imagining you're going to...you want to...you want to...you want to win a tennis match. You are imagining the feel of the racket in your hand, the smell of the grass around you, the taste of your mouth when you drink some water, or Gatorade, or whatever. You're imagining every little sense, every aspect of that game, and you're sending an intention.
Now, OK, we're talking about sports again, but, imagine something else that you'd like to have happen. Or, some effect on someone else, and you imagine it in that kind of specific detail.
Kelly: When you did your intention experiments, did you ask the intenders to also charge their intention with an emotion? Or was it just a thought?
Lynne: No, I asked them, once again, to follow the whole powering up program.
Kelly: OK.
Lynne: And so that was all about using emotion connecting using compassion, sending it out through your heart. All of those things that we discussed.
Kelly: Right. Right. Well, how can deliberate thought about changing something in the present actually influence the past?
Lynne: I think that's the real amazing question, and I was fascinated to see one study. It was carried out by an Israeli professor, Israeli doctor.
What he wanted to do was disprove alternative medicine, and he thought he could do this by coming up with the most outrageous study he could think of.
So he decided that this outrageous study would be a prayer study. So, he divided the group of people in half. They were all patients with a thing called blood sepsis or blood infection very serious life threatening situation.
And he divided them in half, and had half send intention, and the other half not, and the intention was healing prayer.
And he discovered, probably to his horror, that all the people who sent intentions, were better in every way, and got out of the hospital earlier.
But the very interesting aspect of the study and the reason it was so outrageous, was just this: the patients had been in the hospital in Israel between 1992 and 94.
The intentions were sent in the year 2000, six to eight years later.
Kelly: That's amazing.
Lynne: And that was the thing. Now he published it in The Lancet, the famous British medical journal. Universally it was interpreted to mean that we could go back and change the past. Now, Leibovici's point was, "Hey you can't use this kind of stuff, the scientific method to study this kind of really weird woo woo stuff."
But, actually, for many people in consciousness research it just confirmed what they've seen over, and over, and over again in so much data.
There's been many, many, many studies showing that intention works no matter when you send it out. It works yesterday, it works tomorrow, and that it seems to be just as effective to send it for something that has supposedly already occurred.
Now there've been studies of this, and they've been looking at methods of, for instance, sending intention to affect traffic that's already gone through a Viennese tunnel. Or foot traffic in a supermarket.
Now these are people who have already walked in a certain direction. And they've had photo beams to see where they were walking. And they found that when somebody sends an intention later to affect their walking pattern, they actually walk different, and in a different way. Let's say he said, "Let's make them move more to the left than to the right than people when there was no intention and they were just left to walk in their own way.
This has been tracked over and over again. They've found if people can retroactively influence these things called random event generators, which are computerized or audio recordings of something like a toss of a coin.
In this case they were audio recordings of left clicks and right clicks. Because it's a random process, the audio clicks are pretty much distributed 50% of them are in the left ear, and 50% are in the right ear. They found with doing these kind of studies that you could send intention to make more left ear than right clicks after the tapes had been made, and they have an effect.
Kelly: Amazing, that's amazing.
Lynne: What is going on here? The mechanism is that people are all saying is, "Wow, I can go back and change the past!" But actually, what these scientists believe is that you are not going back to change the past. You're you are influencing the present as it's unfolding. In other words, the future effects the present. Another way of saying that is that the present is contingent upon future conditions. The future and the present are constantly shaking hands.
Kelly: That's beautiful.
Lynne: Good stuff.
Kelly: Yeah, yeah, great stuff. What areas are you going to be focusing on in your future intention experiments?
Lynne: We've got some really exciting experiments that we're going to be doing. Again it's on our website, which is by the way, it's very easy. It's theintenionexperiment.com. First of all, we have our weekly intention experiments, where people are just coming online and sending intentions to one of a number of ill people who have put themselves forward, and asked to have intentions sent. That's a really nice informal way our community is working.
Kelly: So if somebody is ill they can go online and ask to...
Lynne: If somebody's ill they can come online and they can send us their information. Then we'll choose them, and put their photo up and ask our community to send an intention at a particular time, so they are all sending at once.
Kelly: How large is the community?
Lynne: It's thousands of people. We have sometimes we've had 10,000 plus. We've had so many people on the site sometimes that the site's crashed. We've had to get web teams, and all sorts of things together to work with us on sorting out some of the technological problems of having thousands of people stare at the same computer page at the same time.
Kelly: Wow.
Lynne: One thing that we've had to do with our intention experiments, where we do the real scientific ones where everybody's got to look at a page at the same time is; sometimes our webmaster controls it. We've had a number of things like that where we've had the web people work out specific programs for it, and use giant groups of servers. In our last big intention experiment we had to link nine servers. We got hold of a company that supplies the web servers for Pop Idol, which is the British equivalent of American Idol, because we knew there were going to be so many people staring at the same page at the same time. It seems like proving intention is easy, but dealing with the technology is the tricky bit.
Kelly: Right, right. We have couple more minutes. Would you mind explain the theory of critical mass as it applies to group intention?
Lynne: This is what I'm testing. I don't really have a theory of critical mass, to be honest. I am looking at whether or not it takes, if there's a threshold effect...
Kelly: The TM Foundation has been doing this for years. They have something called the Global Maharishi Effect, where they say 7,000 people...
Lynne: The Maharishi Effect says there's a threshold effect. You have a certain number of meditators, and at that particular amount, which is the square root one percent of the population of an area, the crime rate goes down. They've been looking at that just on the effect of focused minds, coherent minds. What we're looking at is whether or not thousands of people, who have a coherent mind, who are sending an intention having a bigger effect than an individual.
Now some of the things that we're planning are: we're working with the University of Arizona on creating a little mini Gaia.
Kelly: Is that with Dr. Schwartz?
Lynne: Barry Schwartz, yeah.
Kelly: Dr. Schwartz yeah.
Lynne: And we're working on we're creating a mini Gaia, which is like a little ecosphere that has animal and plant life.
Kelly: Now are you doing that with Rupert Sheldrake too?
Lynne: Rupert's doing another experiment with us, he's going to be doing another one. But this one we're going to see if we can do anything to effect the temperature, because that will have a wonderful implication for global warming. Then Rupert and I, and with Dean Radin with IONS, have talked about doing a giant experiment, the first human study where we just measure the effect of intention.
Then we're looking at water purification. We're going to see if we can purify polluted water. We're looking at lowering crime rate, using again intentions. Then lowering mortality rate at a hospital. Many things like that. Maybe eventually children with attention deficit, anything that can be measured.
Kelly: This is wonderful work.
Lynne: We have a lot of big plans.
Kelly: You certainly do. It's great work that you're doing, Lynne.
Lynne: Well, thank you. We would love for people to be involved in these mass intentions experiments, but there's other things that people can do too. They can work on themselves, and just try out little experiments. Some of the things that I suggest are, you pick in your life something that's never happened, never happened. We suggested if you're a woman and your husband never brings you flowers, send an intention to see if he'll do this.
I had a wonderful woman who just wrote me back and said "You know, I read your book, and my husband never brings me flowers".
"We were in a garden center and I was waiting at the checkout. I turned around and he said, 'Excuse me for a minute.' He came back and he had this giant pot of beautiful geraniums. He said, "Here, these are for you. I just got this message to send you flowers." So there you go, maybe it works.
Kelly: I think it's a good idea for all of us to practice our intention experiments at home.
Lynne: Definitely. It's good to pick something that never happens. Your kids never make their bed. Send an intention, and see what happens.
Kelly: Maybe something that's not such a huge thing. I've never won the lottery, but I don't know if it would work very well with...
Lynne: You could try.
Kelly: I could try.
Lynne: Maybe take it in stages.
Kelly: I don't buy lottery tickets, so maybe that's why I've never won. [laughter]
Kelly: But maybe choosing something that isn't so serious.
Lynne: Yeah. Let's say you're a man, and you absolutely love football, and your wife can't stand it. Send an intention that she's going to want to sit down and watch a game with you next time and see what happens. That'll convince you of the power of intention, because it's something that never happens. But it's just a small thing, and you can go from there.
Kelly: Lynne, what's your website again?
Lynne: It's www.theintentionexperiment.com.
Kelly: Thank you so much for coming on the show today. This was great.
Lynne: We've had a great time, thanks so much too.
Kelly: I really enjoyed it.
Lynne: This is the interesting thing about it is, we don't know what we're going to find. We can't promise a positive result, but the important thing is just to be willing to ask the questions. That's what the scientists who are true explorers really do.
Kelly: Yeah, yeah. I'd love to check in with you in six or eight months and see what's happening.
Lynne: We'll have lots to report.
Kelly: OK, great.
Lynne: That's great.
Kelly: All right, take care.
Lynne: Thanks so much.
Kelly: Bye.
Lynne: Take care.