Toward a Unified Metaphysical Understanding: Global Peace Intention Experiment    
 Global Peace Intention Experiment
2008-07-16, by John Ringland

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A Press Release from Living the Field organisation. Please spread the word!

The Global Peace Intention Experiment

Join Us for September 14th. Other dates to be announced

A “Live Aid” of scientific experiments will test the power of group mind to lower violence around the world

See www.theintentionexperiment.com for more information.

The Intention Experiment – a highly popular ‘global laboratory’, involving an international consortium of scientists in prestigious academic centers and thousands of participants around the world – is planning an ambitious series of scientific studies to determine whether ‘group mind’ has the power to lower violence in areas chosen for high crime and violence levels.

Lynne McTaggart, architect of the experiments and author of the best-selling book The Intention Experiment, has enlisted internationally recognized scientists and readers around the world in a series of global experiments to send intention to controlled scientific targets to restore peace.

The purpose of The Intention Experiment is to involve the web and participants in a voyage of discovery to see to what extent collective thoughts and intentions can change the world. These studies, in effect, constitute the largest mind-over-matter experiments in history.

The study has conducted periodic large-scale experiments to determine whether the focused intention of its readers has an effect on scientifically quantifiable targets in various laboratories around the globe — a specific living thing or a population where change caused by group intention can be measured.

The “Live Aid” Peace Intention Experiment

Recently McTaggart has joined forces with philanthropic organizations around the world to participate in a series of Peace Intention Experiments, which would test the power of group intention to lower violence in a succession of areas around the world noted for high levels of violence.

Thus far, those organizations who have expressed a desire to partner in this project include

  • the Alliance for New Humanity

  • the Oneness Foundation

  • the Association of Global New Thought

  • Unity

  • The Spiritual Cinema Circle

  • World Puja network radio

  • many smaller organizations

‘It is likely that we will have hundreds of thousands of participants sending an intention for peace under highly controlled scientific conditions,’ says McTaggart. ‘This may well represent the largest scientific study in history.’

These studies are to be launched in September 14, 2008, to tie in with the Unity Church’s Eleven days of Unity and to serve as an antidote to the 9/11 anniversary press. It is likely that the first target will be a town in Iraq.

To run the Peace Intention Experiment, McTaggart has assembled a scientific advisory body of leaders in consciousness research, to devise a strict protocol and measure violence levels before and after the intention is sent to see if there is any effect.

The scientific team includes:

Dr. Robert Jahn, former dean of engineering at Princeton University and director of the PEAR Lab,

  • Psychologist Brenda Dunne, also of the PEAR Lab

  • Psychologist Gary Schwartz of the University of Arizona, and director of the Laboratory for Advancement of Consciousness and Health, who has run many healing energy experiments

  • Psychologist Roger Nelson, formerly of Princeton University, and director of the Global Consciousness Project

  • David Orme-Johnson, architect of many of the Transcendental Meditation studies, which showed that a critical mass of meditators has an effect on lowering violence levels

  • Dr. Jessica Utts, professor of statistics at the University of California at Davis, considered the world’s leading statistician of consciousness research

Positive results thus far

After a series of experiments carried out in 2006-7, the Intention Experiment has demonstrated that ‘group mind’ can:

Make seeds grow twice as high as normal

  • Change basic physical properties of leaves

  • Alter the essential structure of water

  • Change physical properties in a plant and a human being

These scientific experiments offer the first scientific demonstrations that collective thoughts have the power to change the world. The six studies involving seed growth have been presented and published by various scientists who conducted the studies with McTaggart at the Society for Scientific Exploration annual meeting in June 2008.

Working with McTaggart on the earlier studies are leading physicists and psychologists from the University of Arizona, Pennsylvania State University, St. Petersburg Technical University, the International Institute of Biophysics, with additional advice from the former PEAR lab at Princeton University, with many more planned.

Current projects

McTaggart has been working with Dr. Rustum Roy, arguably one of the world’s experts on water, to create a mass experiment that would attempt to use thoughts to mutate bacteria and, in so doing, purify polluted water. This result has vast implications about the power of thought to clean up the world’s polluted water supply.

McTaggart’s global laboratory is also moving on to a ‘mini-Gaia’, which involves constructing a miniature ecosystem with the University of Arizona and asking readers to attempt to lower the temperature inside.

If this experiment has significant effect, the implications — that our collective thoughts could tackle global warming — will be extraordinary.

The Intention Experiment has been a bestselling book around the world and the project itself has caught the international imagination. Recently The Intention Experiment was chosen by Amazon readers as one of their 100 top reader favourites for 2007.

For more details contact:

Pavel Mikoloski

Intention Experiment Public Relations

Email: pavel@livingthefield.com

Tel: 011 44 (0)788 2542113

 

Heidi Metcalfe

Senior Publicist

Simon & Schuster

Email: Heidi.Metcalfe@simonandschuster.com

Tel: 212-698-2358

 

End of Press Release...

See www.theintentionexperiment.com for more information.

Some Background Information...

Consciousness and Physical Processes

Consider “The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program, which flourished for nearly three decades under the aegis of Princeton University's School of Engineering and Applied Science, [and which] has completed its experimental agenda of studying the interaction of human consciousness with sensitive physical devices, systems, and processes, and developing complementary theoretical models to enable better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality. It has now incorporated its present and future operations into the broader venue of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories (ICRL)... In this new locus and era, PEAR plans to expand its archiving, outreach, education, and entrepreneurial activities into broader technical and cultural context, maintaining its heritage of commitment to intellectual rigor and integrity, pragmatic and beneficial relevance of its techniques and insights, and sophistication of its spiritual implications.”*

“The goal of [ICRL] is to strengthen the spiritual substance of science by integrating the subjective and objective dimensions of human experience into an expanded Science of the Subjective. This mission is pursued via three primary initiatives in research, education, and applications, each focused on the exploration and representation of the role of consciousness in physical reality.”*

The experiments use Random Event Generators (REG's), which “use quantum-indeterminate electronic noise. They are designed for research applications and are widely used in laboratory experiments.”*

The experiments sought “to determine whether collectively focused human intention can alter the randomicity of a machine and if so, what situations produce the most dramatic effects. On a basic level, an REG is a coin-flipper, automatically generating the equivalent of 200 flips of a coin per second. The result is a bell curve of probabilities, tailing off in both directions from 100 "heads" for each second-long interval. The generators will thus meander around the mean expected value of 100 in an unpredictable fashion but always near the baseline. Sustained deflections away from this baseline mean that the random generator is becoming less random or more coherent.

For some time now research has shown that certain subjects appear to be able to create a small-scale psychokinesis effect which leads REGs to be temporarily less random. Helmut Schmidt has done extensive tests with individuals, usually involving flashing lights that subjects are instructed to alter in a specific way (e.g. moving them in a circle or across a horizontal display). He has shown significant effects, especially with his high-performing individuals, although his initially powerful results have diminished somewhat over the years. Dean Radin echoed this point, stating that his initial effects have tapered off in significant ways after the first few years, perhaps relating to his own habituation as the researcher. A key difference between Schmidt's work and Roger Nelson's is that Schmidt always includes conscious intention in his protocols, whereas Roger is more concerned with the field effects of collectively focused intention, whether the subjects are aware of the REG or not.

Thus, Roger's group at PEAR has been examining collective events in which many people are focused simultaneously on one thing (e.g. the Super Bowl, Academy Awards, O. J. Simpson verdict, New Year's celebration, Lady Diana's funeral) and local group events in which attention coheres in a certain way (e.g. church services, ritual circles, meditation groups, our conference itself). Perhaps the most exciting part of his work is the Global Consciousness Project, which hypothesizes, based upon positive data from earlier work, that dozens of these REGs hooked together via the Internet might constitute something like a global EEG, reflecting disturbances and deviations in collective attention.”*

The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) has “been collecting data from a global network of random event generators since August, 1998. The network has grown to about 65 host sites around the world running custom software that reads the output of physical random number generators and records a 200-bit trial sum once every second, continuously over months and years. The data are transmitted over the internet to a server in Princeton, NJ, USA, where they are archived for later analysis.

[Their] purpose is to examine subtle correlations that reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world. We have learned that when millions of us share intentions and emotions the GCP/EGG network shows correlations. We can interpret this as evidence for participation in a growing global consciousness. It suggests we have the capability and responsibility for conscious evolution. We make the world we live in, and if we Do No Harm, we can help create a Planetary Smile.”*

“For example, during Diana's funeral, there were twelve REGs running around the world. Averaging all of them revealed a significant deviation, especially in the middle of the ceremony. Roger also did a more fine-tuned analysis, charting specific events such as moments of silence or Elton John singing, that again manifested changes away from randomness. More recently, the beginning of bombing in Kosovo produced a significant deflection, though it was not spread evenly over all the generators. One generator in particular had a dramatic change, but they have no hypothesis to explain this uneven distribution. There was a slightly larger deflection in Europe than in the U.S. He uses periods before and after the targeted event as controls to assure that the randomicity of the machine has not been altered due to some mechanical glitch.”*

See the table of results (spanning 1998-present) which shows a list of major world events and the resulting coherence of the global EEG network at that same moment. In this table “the results for individual events are shown. Table entries for most events have direct links to more comprehensive analyses. The events are identified by name, and a column with the heading, "Hypothesis Source", indicates who made the prediction. The number of contributing "REGs" is shown, and the "Resolution", which indicates the block-size for the analysis. The last two columns show the Z-score statistic for the analysis, and its associated probability.”*

For example, have a look at their article September 11 2001: Exploratory and Contextual Analyses, which gives analysis and data that “shows the behavior of the Global Consciousness Project's network of 37 REG devices called "eggs" placed around the world as they responded during various periods of time surrounding September 11...

[The first] graph of data from the formal prediction for September 11 shows a fluctuating deviation throughout the moments of the five major events, during which ever-increasing numbers of people around the world are hearing the news and watching in stunned disbelief. Times of the major events are marked by boxes on the line of zero deviation. The uncertain fluctuation of the EGG data continues for almost half an hour after the fall of the second WTC tower. Then, at about 11:00, the cumulative deviation takes on a strong trend that continues through the aftermath period and ultimately exceeds the significance criterion...

[The second graph] shows the period from September 7th to 13th, and the time of the attacks on September 11 is marked with a black rectangle. You can see that shortly before the terrorist attack, the wandering line takes on a strong trend representing a persistent departure from what is expected of random data. A small probability envelope inserted at that point provides a scale to indicate the extraordinary increase in non-random deviation. The slope of the graph beginning just before the the first WTC tower was hit and continuing for over two days, to noon on the 13th, is extreme.”*

In conclusion: “The formal analysis series shows a cumulative probability against chance of about 10e-6, or odds against chance of a million to one. Put another way, the composite score over many types of events exceeds Z = 4.7 (Nearly 5 Sigma, the standard often set in physics).”*

Two excellent books on these issues are:

The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe

Living The Field

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