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July/August 2008 Featured Stories
Creating a Field of Intention

by Vicky Thompson

Lynne McTaggart knows intention. The best-selling author of The Field and The Intention Experiment took science into her own hands when she began a quest to link together the compelling, but incomplete picture created by scientific studies on intention. New Connexion spoke with the investigative journalist turned researcher who uses a global web laboratory to prove the power of intention.

Q. What inspired you to write The Field?

A. I am the editor of the newsletter What Doctors Don't Tell You and I spend a great deal of time studying the medical literature. In the course of doing that in the mid 1990s, I kept coming across studies on spiritual healing and homeopathy, showing that it works according to scientific evidence. These were well controlled, randomized, placebo controlled trials in some cases. I kept saying to myself, "If this is true, then our understanding of the world is incomplete."

So I convinced my publishers to fund what was essentially a voyage without a compass. I really didn't know what I was looking for or what I was going to find , but I set off as an investigative reporter. I did what every reporter does. I started pulling at strings. You know, you pull at a ball of string and you keep pulling to see where it leads you. I began to speak with top level scientists around the world, and I was astonished at what I found. I realized through interviewing them and pulling at that wad of string, that the old and generally accepted view of reality and science was crumbling right before my eyes.

Q. How did that lead to creating your intention experiments?

A. I realized that each scientist had a little portion of the whole, sharing some aspect of the same thing. But scientists are notorious for staying within the boundaries of their own experimental conclusion - they don't want to reach beyond that and speculate. I soon realized that it was going to be my job to put it all together, to synthesis it and to popularize it. I wanted to know: What can you do with this outside of the laboratory? How far can we intend? What can we prove? And most importantly, can we use thoughts to alleviate the catalog of suffering we see on the planet? I was really interested in using intention for philanthropic purposes.

Q. And so the common theme among the scientists was that thought can affect matter?

A. Many of them were doing studies showing that thought can affect everything from random event generators to single-celled organisms to full-fledged human beings. There was a lot of evidence about the effect of thought, but this was in a laboratory under a controlled situation. So I wanted to look at this in two ways: I wanted to take it out of the laboratory to see how we could use this in real life and also I wanted to study this scientifically in terms of practical application with many people.

There was some very tantalizing stuff, but not very conclusive evidence. And so my husband turned to me one night and said, "Why don't you do these experiments yourself?" And although that sounded ridiculous initially because I am not a scientist and I haven't done an experiment since I was in 10th grade science class, the more I thought about it, the more it was really intriguing. I thought that if I could invite my readers to be part of an experiment and work with scientists, we would have the largest global laboratory in the world. That is what we are doing via my Internet site. We are running periodic experiments.

Q. What are some of the findings from your intention experiments?

A. The first one we did last year started out small with a leaf. At a conference in London, we had the 400-plus people in the audience send intention to one of two leaves that were at the University of Arizona. Noted psychologist Dr. Gary Schwartz and his laboratory team have partnered with me on these and many of the first experiments last year. The whole idea was to try to affect what is known as biophoton emissions, a tiny current of light emissions that are emitted from all living things. We had it blinded and we also had a control. We had two leaves on a webcam and we picked one of them and sent intention to make the leaf glow - to increase the biophoton emissions. Dr. Schwartz called the next day and said, "You won't believe this. The leaf you sent intention was truly glowing compared to the other leaf's photos." And so we not only had numbers, but also photographic proof that the leaf that was sent intention had a greater number of biophoton emissions.

We decided to move on and try to make seeds grow faster and higher. After five days, the intention targeted seeds grew 56 millimeters high compared to 48 millimeters for the non-targeted seeds. That's an 8 millimeter difference in height. That's quite substantial.

Q. Intention seems very powerful. Are there ways that we emotionally sabotage our intentions?

A. The emotional body in a sense is like a psychic bubble surrounding us. It's basically our response to the past. Oftentimes we're not aware of the emotions we carry. In my view, everybody thinks of intention as "the big ask" or "the power thought," and it's only in these times that it works. But if we are beings of light sending out a current of light all the time, we are sending out information all the time. And as we do, we are beaming out what is usually negative information - emotional information that is oftentimes a negative response to past events based on judgments about what is going to happen. So in a sense, that is our message to the world. And that becomes our big ask - we are just not aware of it. That is what we are really intending. And we might have a power thought one minute of the day, but the rest of the time our messages are incoherent, negative and sabotaging.

Q. How you can turn off the mind when it's sending out negative thoughts?

A. Evidence has shown that animals, artistic savants and people who are brain damaged are better intenders. They pick up information in exquisite detail largely because it is not interfered with by the cognitive mind. We receive information through our amygdala. It's the old brain and the emotional brain in the sense that the emotional receiver picks up information immediately. Then the cognitive mind takes a whole lot longer to make out the meaning and its relationship to the "I" as we perceive it. So we pick up all of that rare sensory data and then we mess it up when we cognitively try to process and interpret it. So we work on receiving this immediate information without interpreting it. I also work on limbic resonance, which is developing the ability of people to entrain with each other when they send intention. Their body systems begin to work in tandem so they are more likely to pick up information from other people. And they are more likely to pick up your intentions. The simplest way is to hold someone's hand. Establish a connection with them.

Q. How can you become a more effective intender?

A. I interviewed intention masters, including healing masters, qigong masters, Buddhist monks and masters from other traditions. And I tried to find all the commonalities so that I could develop a simple program that people could follow. I was fascinated to find that there are certain mind states, emotional states, heart states, and certain times and places that are better to send intention. A lot of information that I have developed came from studying animals who have all kinds of sixth senses, and so do we. We turn that off because we have this cognitive overlay. There have been many studies on the sixth senses of people. You can blindfold people and they can find their way home. But you need to tune in to different kinds of information when you are doing that. So we work on receiving and sending in a gut way and not working via the forebrain, which creates separateness. We think of the forebrain as the smart brain. I think of it as the dumb brain because it creates separation, wars and competition.

Q. Where are we moving to beyond the forebrain?

A. We are moving to our gut, our sixth senses. We are moving to places beyond words. Now of course we can't do that all the time. We need that forebrain for problem solving and it's brilliant on a day-to-day basis. We shouldn't be using it, however, to send or receive intention. We should be operating from a different place where there is less separation, where we are surrendering to a larger force. We are in a sense, entering the field.

Q. What are your intentions in doing this work?

A. If I can demonstrate to the world that intention, and particularly group intention, is a powerful entity for good, for humanity and for humanitarian pursuits, then I believe that this will empower people to understand that one good thought is all it takes to change the world.

Find out more about intention experiments at www.theintentionexperiment.com. Lynne McTaggart presents an intention workshop on Aug. 8-10 in the Portland area at the Hilton Vancouver. For details, visit www.theintentionworkshops.com.