Episode 44 - Lynne McTaggart – Part 2: Evolutionary Perspective on The Intention Experiment

Transcript

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Duncan Campbell: From time immemorial, beginning with indigenous councils and ancient wisdom traditions through the work of Western visionaries such as Plato, Galileo, and quantum physicist David Bohm, mutually participatory dialogue has been seen as the key to evolving and transforming consciousness, evoking a flow of meaning--a dia (flow) of logos (meaning)--beyond what any one individual can bring through alone. So join us now as together with you, the active deep listener, we evoke and engage in “Living Dialogues”.

Welcome to the program. I'm your host, Duncan Campbell, and with me for this particular program, I'm truly delighted to have with me as my guest, Lynne McTaggart, author most recently of the “The Intention Experiment”. So, Lynne, one of the things I'd like to do to start with is to introduce you to our audience. You are an award-winning journalist and author of the bestselling book “The Field” which can be seen at www.LivingTheField.com and as co-founder and Editorial Director of “What Doctors Don’t Tell You”.

You published health newsletters that are among the most widely praised in the world. You are also the Editor of “Living The Field”, of course, to bring the Science of the Field into everyday life. Your company also holds highly popular conferences and workshops on health and spirituality. We'll be talking about your new breakthrough which is this brilliant new book, “The Intention Experiment” we're about to talk about today. It's got a new section not only in terms of your scientific experiments and your scientific research but also the wonderful thing about this book is that it invites the people, themselves, all of us into a participation worldwide in these kinds of experience that we will shortly talk about.

So, Lynne, let's start off by saying Deepak Chopra, author of the very popular book “Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment” has said of this book, “The Intention Experiment is an extraordinary advance in our understanding of consciousness as a field of all possibilities where intention orchestrates its own fulfillment. If you want to empower yourself and use the laws of intention to manifest your material reality, read this book.”

Now one thing I'd like to say right off the bed, is that to me, this is like a whole tier above things that we've been exposed to like “The Secret” and other self-help books over the years beginning when the book you mentioned as maybe starting this whole thing, I think can be rich.  This is not about thinking in being rich. This is not about fantasizing Mercedes or Cadillacs or that sort of thing or having a big house. This is about something much more profound and serious, grounded in the science that’s come about in the last 100 years beginning with the Quantum Physics Revolution in the early part of the 20th century.

So let's talk now, Lynne, as to why your book and your research actually is a real breakthrough here and is not just a sense of promoting people’s desires for material wealth.

Lynne McTaggart: I guess, there's nothing wrong with trying to manifest things for yourself. But I guess, what was interesting to me was the idea of group mind and what we could do with intention to heal the world. I think that was really my great interest. And I suppose it also stems from some of the thoughts that aren’t really well known about Napoleon Hill and Wallace Wattles. The people really came up with things like the law of attraction. [xx] talked about giving back, not just taking.

All of these things were going through my mind when we put together “The Intention Experiment”. But it also came about from a kind of real curiosity as to how much you can do with intention because it's such a big buzz word these days, everybody talks about intention. And you, being the feet-on-the-ground type of person and I am, with an investigative reporting background, I wanted to know what intention and what can you do with intention.

How can we use this in a practical way outside the laboratory? What can we do with it? Can we solve global warming with our thoughts? Can we stop trains in their tracks with our thoughts? What can we do with it? So that was really the idea of having this global laboratory is to really test it to its limit and use it to a philanthropic effect.

Duncan Campbell: Here, I think, one of the very interesting things that we want to get in to from a subtle point of view is whether or not the philanthropic effect is necessary to the intention in order to manifest. Here, we have the conundrum, for instance, that Larry Dossey brought to our attention some years ago when he wrote a book “Be Careful What You Pray For”.

Larry Dossey, as many of our listeners may remember who’s been on this program a number of times, is one of the pioneering physicians who has brought, not only mind body medicine to the fore along with John 5:18 and a number of other physicians, Andy Wile and so on; but he also, in his book, documented the power of prayer to heal at a distance even in situations where the, let's say, the cancer patient did not know they were being prayed for and so on. He also, thereby, really uncovered what we might call the Quantum effect of non-locality, that prayer intentionality on someone else’s part can heal even a perfect stranger at a distance.

However, he then wrote a book, as I mentioned, “Be Careful What You Pray For” saying it occurred to him that if positive prayer, prayer that’s selfless, prayer that’s for healing can work and then, presumably, curses and voodoo could also work. So in that very detailed study, what he found was that yes, intention of good and bad can work, so the philanthropic--we might say--intention is not necessary to the effect. Perhaps, we have to address that as well right here at the beginning.

Lynne McTaggart: That’s true. I have a whole chapter on negative prayer. People always ask me, “Positive thinking is much more powerful than negative thinking.” I wish I could say that, Duncan, but I can’t. The evidence shows that negative intention is just as powerful as positive intention. There’s a great folklore about negative intention, you know, things like pointing the bone in certain cultures that is known to work.

You see this with other masters of intentions like Chigong masters, they use destroying mind as well as peaceful mind. Peaceful mind is positive intention and destroying mind is negative intention. They use this to do a kind of mental standoff with their opponents and they do it with very powerful effect. Studies have shown, with this kind of negative intention, that the subject, the person being sented, his brainwaves start to mimic those of the person sending. So it's just as powerful and it affects the recipient.

Duncan Campbell: Here's a very, very profound point, I think, that comes out in Larry’s book and also in your work which is you do not want to get drawn into--what was that old cartoon “Spy versus Counterspy” where they had the white spy dressed in white and then the other dressed in black--you don’t want to get in to a battle of negative thinking.

If somebody is projecting negative thinking on you, the way to respond according to the shamans that Larry Dossey talked to is not to just sort of get your own negative shaman and get in to a battle of negative thoughts. You respond to actually protect yourself by the power of the field of energy that you can create around yourself with your own positive intention of integrity, ethical view based on compassion and love. All of the things that the great mystical and religious and spiritual traditions at their deepest core tell us is the essence of human experience.

So at the end of the day, there really is a positive answer to the question as Einstein said, “Is the universe beneficent?” He answered, “Yes, as a scientist and as an individual.” I think from that perspective, let's talk about how--number one--this notion of the power of intention represents a scientific breakthrough for the West. Then, let's talk about why the power of positive intention is actually recommended rather than using it for negative purposes.

Lynne McTaggart: OK. First of all, just the idea of it, we're now beginning to understand it, Duncan, that it is an astral physical entity. It's an energy that we can measure, we have the tools and the equipment now to demonstrate the power of thought. This was part of my journey was to understand exactly how this could work. How can somebody send a thought to someone else and have that someone else get better. What's the mechanism involved?

I think one of the really interesting aspects of this is the fact that we now know that the world, as we think of it, is not the Neutonian world that we've been brought up with. This idea, this very well behaved place with separate objects that operate according to fix laws in time and space. That’s what we were brought up with.

We're now understanding that even big matter, the molecules and atoms that make up our big visible world operate according to Quantum laws. They are not a congealed anything yet, there are just a potential of things, so that demonstrates their much more influencible. We also now know from the science that we are sending and receiving Quantum information all the time to each other and to all living things basically through a tiny current of light. We're beaming out instructions all the time. Even our thoughts themselves are things that can be captured in special photographic equipment.

Gary Schwartz, the psychologist at the University of Arizona has done some fantastic work photographing healing energy coming out of healers with this special photographic equipment that photographs these very, very tiny light. He's shown that there’s an increase of energy when someone sends a healing intention. So we're now being able to demonstrate through the West what has always been an intuition in the East about how these things work. We now know they work. We can demonstrate them. We show this through science.

Duncan Campbell: I think the key here is in your books, “The Field” and now, “The Intention Experiment”, we show these effects through science. We know from ancient cultures that had beliefs such as the belief in the evil eye that the evil eye, we might say, or a negative intention focused on another tribal member or someone of another tribe, could have a negative effect. We see that that’s possible in our modern contemporary era. That was part of Larry Dossey’s research when he went out to Hawaii and other places.

However, in our modern mind, since the Industrial Revolution and Isaac Newton in 1687 with his classical laws of Physics, we have progressively come to think that that is just raw superstition and magical thinking on the part of less developed cultures. We went along quite merrily here with what Richard Feynman calls “The grand rules of the game”, i.e., Newtonian Physics and the notion from Rene Dekart, the 17th century philosopher, that the mind is separate from matter and that matter, as you say, is objectified. It is separate and it can only be acted upon by an outside force like a collision or another piece of identifiable and object even separated matter.

What we started to find at the beginning of the 20th century with Niels Borh and his mentee, Werner Heisenberg, is that, in fact, at the level of the tiniest particles that are measurable in the universe, this so called “quanta” in the subatomic realm that instead of being identifiable separate particles like this is a table and that over there is a chair or I am Duncan or you are Lynne that, in fact, there was like a floating sea, as you put it, possibilities of dancing energies that were in constant interplay and communication with each other, constantly on the phone to each other, as you put it in very colloquial terms.

For a long time and even now in some of our universities, it said that those effects happen only at the Quantum level, way below the level of what we experience in our everyday life, at temperatures that are extremely cold. In fact, I remember, right here in Boulder when “What the Bleep” movie came here two or three years ago, there was an article in the local paper in which the journalist, to discredit the movie altogether, quoted a physicist from the University of Colorado poo-pooing the fact that any so-called Quantum effect could happen outside the laboratory or at temperatures above 250 degrees below zero and only in the Quantum world and this is only two or three years ago.

Yet the discoveries of Quantum Physics go back over a hundred years and has still not made it into the mainstream culture. In your book, “The Field”, you point out numerous experiments all over the world that have shown that the so-called Quantum effects occur in our everyday world. So maybe, let's start there with this, I regard now, a superstitious belief on the part of some our credentialed academic scientists that are teaching in universities that somehow this is still all nonsense.

Lynne McTaggart: This is the thing that’s so interesting and I found so interesting, Duncan, about researching this book to find that the kind of effects that scientists have always maintained only work in the Quantum world. Most scientists, most physicists, believe there are two kinds of Physics - there's the Physics of the Large and the Physics of the Small. The Physics of the Large or fundamental Physics or the grand rules of the game, as you say, were the ones that define us and define matter. It's this very well-behaved place where things operate according to tiny, little laws.

Then you've got this crazy Alice-in-Wonderland place called the Quantum world that, as you say, a lot of physicists still don’t really get but that has enormous amount of science--probably some of the best enormous work of all equations--but is only used for a lot of cookbook-type stuff, to make buns and things like that. But when it comes to real understanding of the metaphysical implications of Quantum Physics, a lot of people leave that aside.

But new scientists, a lot of frontiers scientists are now understanding that those strange Alice-in-Wonderland properties actually governed the world at large and this is an enormous discovery. For instance at the University of Chicago, they’ve discovered things like atoms, big things like atoms are non-locally connected. They're finding this not at just at those freezing temperatures but that in slightly warmer temperatures, too.

The idea of that atoms can have that instantaneous conversation with each other, instantaneous transfer of information without any kind of force or any kind of energy, it just breaks every law of Physics. In Physics, they believe that influence can only occur if you do something with force to something else. You have to freeze it, burn it, drop it or give it a good swift kick. That’s how you affect something, that’s the way Physics defines influence. But now, we're understanding that influence can be instantaneous and that it's happening not just with atoms but between stars, in our bodies, everywhere. We're finding this whole idea of normalcality [sp].

The other really interesting thing is this whole idea that big things aren’t quite congealed anything yet. That’s the really strange thing about a Quantum particle. It's not a set anything, it's all possible selves all at the same time. There’ve been some studies at the University of Vienna discovering just the same thing with giant-sized molecules. You can send them through that famous double-slit experiment where they’ve found that, say, light particles go through both slits at the same showing that a subatomic particle can be two places at once. The same thing happens with big molecules, molecules containing as much as a hundred atoms.

So this is pretty remarkable because it's saying that that big world up there that we thought was so fixed and finite and full of finalized assemblages [sp] isn’t that way at all. It's much more a potential and also that it may well be--as it is in Quantum Physics--that observation, the person doing the observing in science of Quantum Physics is the person who tends to make collapse spot [sp] potential of something into something real.

There seems to be some involvement between observer and observed. They're now believing--many scientists are in the frontier--that the same thing occurs in the world at large now. That somehow, our observation, our involvement in things makes them real. So this describes the world that’s much more mutable, much more influenciable than the scientific world view we've been given.

Duncan Campbell: It has very direct physical as well as metaphysical implications. In a very easy to understand example, for instance, you have in your book a statement regarding William Braud, psychologist and Research Director of the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio, Texas and later at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. “Through experiments that were rigorously scientific, they demonstrated that human thoughts can affect the direction in which fish swim, the movement of other animals such as gerbils and the breakdown of cells in the laboratory.

He also designed some of the earliest well-controlled studies of mental influence on human beings. In one group of these studies, he demonstrated that one person could affect the autonomic nervous system or fight-or-flight mechanisms of another. Electrodermal activity (EDA) is a measure of skin resistance and shows an individual state of stress. A change of the electrodermal activity, the EDA, will usually occur if someone were stressed or made uncomfortable in some way. His signature study tested the effect on EDA of being stared at, one of the simplest means of isolating the effect of remote influence on a human being.”

So here there are detailed scientific studies repeated in the laboratory showing that, in fact, the evil eye, as it was known in ancient cultures, is actually true and it only makes common sense. We all know that somehow we can be made to feel uncomfortable and there can be actually--now we see a change in our own internal material body mechanisms by simply being stared at by another. So it only makes sense that what we're finding now is confirming what people have known but had not had this, what we might call, modern scientific studies to prove it.

However, I think the value of these modern scientific studies is enormous because in our modern world, people really have been so educated to believe that the unseen world is simply a fiction. It’s so concentrated on if you can't x-ray it or photograph it, it simply doesn’t exist. There has been, over the years, a lot of accusations by the American Medical Association of ancient medical systems like, let's say, Ayurveda from India or acupuncture from China--that have been in existence literally effectively for thousands of years--as quackery because you don’t have in those systems a visible chi pathway, as they call it.

If you can't x-ray it, you can't photograph it, it doesn’t look like the vascular system, it doesn’t look like your nervous system, and so, therefore, it doesn’t exist. Now, we know it does exist and many hundreds of thousands and millions of people in the United States have gone to alternative medicine as a way to supplement what’s available in our conventional allopathic medicine.

So I think your book is of enormous importance. It does give people the eye-opening assurance that if they’ve been educated in this way, to mistrust anything that’s not “scientifically verified”. You've collected in one book “The Field” and now in this book, massive demonstration that scientists were pioneering all over the world, have already demonstrated this. The most interesting thing about your book is that you're inviting the readers to actually participate in a very large series of worldwide experiments with you.

Now, before we get in to that, I have to say that one of the things you discovered about intentionality is that people have to actually know the difference between intentionality and simple desire. Part of that, I believe, is the understanding and the conviction that what we're talking about is real. So you say, before people could participate in some of these experiments that we'll talk about for the collective good of the planet, they really need to read your book and observe it and then participate in a particular way.

So, Lynne, perhaps you might want to introduce, before we talk about these experiments, that very interesting chapter that you have on how lie detector tests have played a role in this new science.

Lynne McTaggart: This is one of many examples of frontier scientists who have made incredible discoveries that have been buried for many years. This one concerns Cleve Baxter who is the US’s chief lie detector expert. He developed a special kind of polygraph equipment back in the ‘60s and this is back at that time when he was a young man. He was sitting one night and he was very bored. So he looked over at his plant [xx] plant, and he thought to himself, “I wonder what would happen if I attach that plant to my polygraph equipment? I wonder if it would react when I poured water in it.” So he did.

At that time, polygraph equipment was a set of electrodes that you would attach to your fingers and that would be attached, in turn, to a read-out mechanism that would be like a pen drawing a squiggly line. If it was a tiny squiggle, that meant you were telling the truth. If it got to be a great big squiggle as you've seen in B-movies, that meant you were lying and it was recording your autonomic nervous system response. When you start to sweat, when your heart beats faster, all those things showing that you're stressed, that is picked up by a lie detector piece of equipment.

So he does this and he pours the water in and the plant, if the plant were human, the plant would have reacted in boredom. That’s what it seems to be saying, “I'm bored.”  Now, water it again, darn it. So, he thought to himself, “Well, I have to do something a bit more drastic here.” So he started thinking about doing something like burning its leaf, he thought to himself, “I'd burn its leaf.” Just at the moment he thought that, the plant registered alarm on the polygraph equipment.

So Baxter ran and he actually got matches and he lit the matches and he came towards the plant and he was waving the matches. The plant, all this while, is registering terrible alarm! So he puts it down, he let's go of that and then suddenly, the plant comes down. He thinks to himself, “I don’t believe it. That plant just read my thoughts!” So from there, he then started on a whole program of studying all kinds of living things--eggs, bacteria, yogurt, human sperm--hooking them up to his lie detector equipment. He found that living things started reacting to human beings and to the comings and goings of all living things in their environment.

For instance, he had an automated system where he would pour some sponge shrimp into some boiling water and it would die on impact. All of the plants in his office would register alarm! He was a great fan of “Star Wars” and he used to say, you know, it was like Yoda saying, “I feel a disturbance in the fort.” So from here, Baxter understood that there was some sort of primary consciousness that all living things had and they could pick up information from other living things around them. They were picking up thoughts and all kinds of things going on in their environment.

But because he wasn't a traditional scientist, Baxter was ridiculed. He was even given an Esquire Dubious Achievement Award on one of its issues. You know, “Scientist says yogurt talks to itself.” But from then, it took a few decades later for Fritz Popp, the German physicist, and others to find that actually living things are sending out light at every moment. And that we are sending and receiving all the time and we are communicating with our environment. Baxter was right, he was just a man before his time.

Duncan Campbell: Here, I think, one of the really interesting things is the philosopher Schopenhauer, who said, quoted by Richard Feynman, the physicist, “The truth always emerges in three stages. First, it is ridiculed.” This would be Copernicus, Galileo, for instance. “The secondly, it is viciously opposed by the establishment.” This would again be Galileo, Copernicus had the good sense to publish his book that showed that the earth was, in fact, not the center of the universe but was revolving around the sun on the day he died so as to escape, really, the inquisition, we might say. Galileo confirmed these findings with his telescope and was silenced by the Catholic Church and not forgiven until 1992, 367 years later.

So that’s phase 2, viciously opposed, and then finally, the establishment is forced to acknowledge the truth of these pioneering paradigm shifts and accepts it and claims it as its own over, oftentimes, really the dead bodies or the ruined careers of the people that were bold enough to first to go against the existing paradigm. Of course, they’ve been routinely dismissed by skeptics as madmen, for instance, Martin Luther himself who founded the Reformation, dismissed Copernicus as a raving lunatic.

So this is something that we see in Thomas Kuhn’s great book on the emergence of scientific paradigms where he quotes Max Planck, the great physicist who says that Physics and science progress funeral to funeral. Meaning that despite the fact that scientists, like Churchman in the spiritual Church, claimed to have rigorous adherence to scientific experimental truth. Something seems to happen to him in a very human realm where if they’d built a career or maybe a very comfortable position in the university or status based on a certain scientific paradigm that when they were young was the breakthrough paradigm.

Then another person comes along with a paradigm which shows that theirs is really outdated because as Thomas Kuhn points you could even describe Science as a history of errors that have been repeatedly shown not to be true. We've had lots of approximations of what is true and then they get surpassed by new scientific discovery since. So that’s what he meant by saying that Science preceeds funeral to funeral is that when the establishment people die off, the younger people--if they're still alive--can be honored and respected for what they’ve done.

I want to give one example here. We have Rupert Sheldrake, someone that’s been on this program and known to many of our listeners. Rupert Sheldrake, among his book, has one called “Dogs Who Know When Their Masters Are Coming Home”. He also has one called “The Sense of Being Stared At“. In these books, he describes, as a world renowned biologist, his proposal of the morphogenetic fields that there are fields in the nonmaterial world that actually generate form and matter. He calls them morpho for form and genetic for generating fields.

He points out that even in conventional Newtonian Physics, people also regard as real the field of gravity and electromagnetic fields, which are exceptions to the general rule that if you can't photograph it or x-ray it, it doesn’t exist because you can't photograph gravity and you can't x-ray electromagnetic fields. But they are regarded as true because of their effects. Now, Rupert Sheldrake is proposing that there are morphogenetic fields of intentionality that we can see our real from their effects.

One of the series of experiments he did like the ones you've talked about, Lynne, with dogs was that originally the skeptics were saying, “Hey, the dog gets up from his bed and he moves toward the door at a certain time when the master is maybe getting on the train from London to come home 45 minutes away.” Maybe, he hears something or maybe he smells something or whatever and so he knows by other material sense data when the master is coming home. It cannot be that just the master’s intention by stepping on the train has cued the dog maybe 50 miles away.

So what he did was that he head simulcast videos that were recording the dog at home and he had the dog’s companion person go out into the middle of London, take cabs at random until he called that person on a cellphone and said, “Go sit on a park bench and form the intention to go home now.” They did it and they saw, time and again, that at the very moment when that person formed the intention, had not even gotten in a cab, had formed the intention, the dog got up and went to the door.

Lynne McTaggart: In some of my other work, in my “Living the Field” course, I've done a lot of studies on animals because animals, they're much more naturally being to live in the field. They pick up all kinds of information far more than we do. I'll tell you a wonderful story about that which was my dog, Olie [sp], our dog was very, very independent when he was a pup and we live very close to Wimbledon Common in London. We were walking and one day, he got lost, he went off and he made his own way home, by the way.

So our neighbor was telling some other people about our dog in front of him and saying, “Oh, here's Olie, he's so unteachable. He's been [xx] training and yet still got lost. He's just hopeless.” At which point, Olie went--and I was just smiling trying to be friendly--and Olie went up and conked his leg all over her Wellington boot and then turned around and did it on the other side. I kept wondering to myself, I was hugely astonished but I was more astonished because I was wondering he’s never done that before since. I wondered, “Was that understanding of cognitive language or did he just read her thoughts?” It was just still a mystery to me and it was wonderful. But I find that in all kinds of stories of animals, of picking up the information having incredible psychic ability and picking up information that is beyond the smell of their owners and all that kind of thing, they are in full use of extrasensory perception.

Duncan Campbell: We're going to talk about why participating in this book and with this book has tremendous possibilities that could advance the realm of our understanding. We become fmembers of an experiment that is outside the laboratory that could have tremendous beneficial effects on the planet.

Now, we also want to ask you, Lynne, to say what is the website people can go to.

For full transcript, please contact Duncan Campbell