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Late note - If you read this earlier, know that you may have missed the last few paragraphs of the information, as it was first posted before I had completed it. Also, I did want to mention the overlapping similarities with Gregg Braden's work (we have a discussion thread dedicated to that work). They are both interested in where science and spirituality confirm one another. Gregg's interest comes from ancient texts and philosophies, Lynne's from the medical field. Lynne McTaggart has 2 websites, in case you want to explore further or sign up to work on some of her experiments and projects. The Living the Field website can be found here - http://www.livingthefield.com/ (Lynne offers a Living the Field course there). She also has an Intention Project website at http://www.intentionexperiment.com/.
In the Nov 2007 issue of Science of Mind magazine is an interview written by Barbara Stahura with Lynne McTaggart known for her books - The Field and The Intention Experiment. I took part in the first 2 Intention Experiments last spring and early summer. I've lost track with what is happening with her and her work, even though I do receive email updates. I do know that beyond “scientifically proving” that intentions can be amassed to produce more profound effects, Lynne has a larger vision of using the group of people she has brought together to have good effects on specific situations. When I saw that SOM magazine had interviewed her, I thought this would be a good opportunity to share some things about Lynne. I've been delayed in doing this, by having so many good topics to keep up with in our pod, but perhaps, this is the day, when I complete this intention (some excerpts below come directly from that article).
”Change your thinking, change your life.” has long been the phrase used as a core truth by the Science of Mind. Our thoughts order the infinite potential of the quantum level or the foundational energy of the universe. We create reality, which is never static but eternally fluid. Every one of our thoughts is a measurable bit of that quantum energy and can alter the physical properties of other things. As our thoughts become more ordered and deliberate, as in meditation, they seem to have a more powerful or coherent effect on the world, than when they are random or scattered. Even more amazing, our thoughts can cross time and space, and can actually produce an effect after something has happened.
Lynne McTaggart is an investigative journalist and is widely respected for her work in the world of quantum science. She was initially led down this path as a personal quest to discover if any new scientific theories could explain how homeopathy and spiritual healing work. This research led to the publication of her book The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe and more recently, the publication of The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World.
SOM asks “How did you come to write about what you call the science of spirituality?
McTaggart answers that it was a happy accident. Her work had been to write about medicine, what works and what doesn't work. In her research, she often came across studies demonstrating that practices like homeopathy and spiritual healing work. This led her to believe that if it was true, then there was something missing in our understanding of the way our bodies and the world works.
She convinced her publishers to fund this research project, by telling them that she thought that there was an energy field out there and that she wanted to talk with frontier physicists and scientists to see what they were discovering that might relate to this energy field. Her own journey, while starting in her head in the world of scientific discovery, led to her heart and became a personal transformation of her life. She never expected to find a completely new world paradigm in this scientific frontier or to so radically change her own worldview.
SOM asks “Metaphysical and spiritual traditions have long told us that our thoughts affect our reality. Your work backs that up with science. Is it important to you that the science proves the truth behind the spiritual concepts?”
Lynne answers that she is by nature a grounded and skeptical person, that she accepts very little on faith alone but that she is constantly looking at what works and what doesn't in medicine, whether it is conventional or alternative. She felt that it was important to find the proof she was seeking in a science of spirituality, to stay open minded but to seek proof.
SOM asks “What makes thoughts so powerful?”
She answers that “It's clear from the evidence of researchers like German physicist Fritz-Albert Popp, U of AZ psychologist Gary Schwartz, and Russian physicist Konstantin Korotkov, that thoughts are an energy we can measure. Thoughts are very well-ordered light. We know that we're sending and receiving tiny particles of light at every moment. These scientists have demonstrated that these are messages that are being sent out and replied to by our environment.”
Focused thought appears to have energetic components - a magnetic and electrostatic component. Thought seems to be able to change the hydrogen-oxygen bonds of water. Therefore, it is an energy that can be measured. In the studies conducted by Fritz-Albert Popp, light comes out of living things (including human beings) which is extremely coherent. That means well ordered. When these light waves are in phase or well ordered, they magnify each other's effect. When they're out of phase, and destructive, they cancel each other out.
An example of this is a 60-watt light bulb. This light has a lot of destructive interference, which is why it's not very powerful. But if you had a 60-watt bulb that was full of coherent light, the energy density of that single bulb would be thousands to millions of times brighter than the surface of the sun. That's what coherence does - it magnifies the power by hundreds of thousands of times and that's another reason why thoughts are so powerful, because when we are healthy, we are emitters of well-ordered light. This light is called biophoton emissions.
According to Popp, biophoton emissions are the trading mechanism for energy between living things and the Zero Point Field (the quantum energy field of which all things are a part). This trading maintains a kind of equilibrium. For example, if you shine a light on a living thing, it will wait a moment and then expel the excess. This low-level, and constant, dribbling of light maintains equilibrium. When one is unhealthy or stressed, their light emissions actually go up.
SOM asks “Why do you think it's so important that we know about biophotons and this light?”
McTaggart answers that this light form is the communication system within the body. These biophoton emissions originate within the cell's DNA. This idea differs from the theory that cellular communication occurs through chemistry in which molecules bump into other molecules. Whatever the process, it is responsible for all the millions of instantaneous reactions that occur in our body. The cell is mostly water, and molecules take up a fraction of the space of a cell, so if chemistry alone explains the method of cellular communication, it would be a bit like 2 tennis balls bumping into each other in a swimming pool. What are the chances of that occurring instantaneously? The way that all of these processes of our body occur make that very, very unlikely.
So, in Popp's view, many of the body's processes are driven, not by chemistry but instead by light emissions and, the DNA of the body is beaming out instructions all the time. This light is the conductor of the body. Outside the body, this light is the body's communication mechanism with its environment. Studies of fleas show that light emissions between fleas occur in synchrony. They are sending and receiving messages all the time. Dr Gary Schwartz has imaged string beans and found that when you cut a string bean, the pieces start talking to each other. So these kinds of emissions are constantly going back and forth between an organism and its environment.
SOM says “Knowing this encourages me to be careful of sending negative thoughts, like when another driver cuts in front of me, for instance.”
Lynne says “Absolutely. The thing I hope that people take away from reading The Intention Experiment is that intention is all the stuff that goes through your mind, all your secret judgments as you walk down the street, like “I don't like that woman's haircut.” Everything you think of in your life becomes your life's intention.”
SOM asks “How does intention change reality?”
McTaggart says “It's very important we understand intention because we are having an effect all the time. Orthodox science maintains that there are 2 kinds of realities: the reality of the very large and the reality of the very small, and the science of the very small, many scientists still believe, does not apply to the science of the large.”
Quantum particles exist in a state called “superposition”, meaning that they are just a potential of something - they are all of their possible selves all at the same time. At some point, they collapse into a single state, which turns the potential into something real. Many scientists believe that effect is caused by living observation. This suggests that we are co-creators, that consciousness is involved in making reality.
Up until recently, quantum scientists believed that superposition only occurred with quantum particles. Now, we have discovered that it is equally true with larger things, even with the building blocks of molecules (which are the building blocks of the sticks and stones of our material reality). Molecules containing as many as 100 atoms have now been shown to be in this not-quite-something-real state. If this is true, then it's quite likely that we are having an effect on our environment all the time.
SOM asks “Is there a difference between intention and attention?”
Lynne states that she believes attention is just a form of intention. By just putting attention toward something - people are getting involved in it's creation. McTaggart does believe that there are certain conditions that seem to make intention work better than others. In her book, The Intention Experiment, she includes a description that she calls ”Powering Up”. She has found that her ideas are mirrored in the practices of Qigong masters as well as master healers.
SOM asks “What then do you think is our responsibility with regard to our thoughts?”
She answers that we have to be more conscious about what we are thinking. It isn't as simple as instructing us to always have “happy thoughts” though we do need to become more mindful about what does rattle around in our brains all day. To that end, McTaggart does offer a program of steps in the back of her book to learn how to focus because she believes that is a key to successful intention. It is also important to try and replace some that stream of constant negativity, that some people have, with a more positive kind of thinking. You can become more mindful of the fact that you're affecting everyone around you all the time. Studies show that wound healing can be delayed by an entire day after a single argument.
SOM says “One exciting concept for me in your book was retroactive intention. Would you explain how we might be able to use it?”
McTaggart says that one of the most surprising findings to come from her research is that we can send our intention today to affect what happened yesterday. This was shown in a study conducted by Leonard Leibovici of Israel. It was a prayer study in which healing intention was sent to a group of patients with sepsis (a blood infection) while another group with sepsis was treated conventionally without prayers being offered for them as a control. Leibovici found that the group that was prayed for had a better outcome in every way. The most unusual aspect was that the patients were in the hospital between 1992 and 1994 but the experiment with the prayer group was carried out in the year 2000 (6-8 yrs later).
While some have interpreted this experiment to mean that we can change the past, frontier scientists believe that this is not the case. What they believe is that our intention reaches back down the timeline to affect what happened in the first place. In this manner, our present may not only be affected by what has happened in the past but by ways that the future is continually affecting our present.
It is hard to grasp this idea because we ourselves create time and space. All of the evidence in quantum physics and in the many experiments McTaggart has studied seem to demonstrate that our concept of time is far too limited. Time may be more accurately described as one great big smeared-out now. Many intention studies work better out of sequential time. They work better when you're sending a retro-intention or one out into the future. When Lynne asked Robert Jahn from the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab about it, he said “Simple. Take time out of it and it all makes sense.”
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