The Intention Experiment: Use Your Thoughts to Change the World. Lynne McTaggart

23 Any departure from the norm can be precisely measured and shown to be an experimental effect. In that instance, our aim would be to determine whether focused group intention will enable wounds to heal more quickly than usual.

      Naturally, you don’t have to participate in our experiments. If you don’t wish to get involved, you can read about the intention experiments of others, and use some of that information to inform how you use intention in your life.

      Please do not casually participate in the experiments. In order for the experiment to work properly, you must read the book and digest its contents fully beforehand. The experimental evidence suggests that those who are the most effective have trained their minds, much as athletes train their muscles, to maximize their chances of success.

      In order to discourage uncommitted participation, The Intention Experiment website contains a complicated password comprising some words or ideas from the book (which will change slightly every few months). In order to be part of the experiment, you will have to log on with the password and you will have to have read the book and understood it.

      The website (www.theintentionexperiment.com) has a running clock (set to US Eastern Standard Time and Greenwich Mean Time). At a particular moment on a date specified on the website, you will be asked to send a carefully worded, detailed intention, depending on the target site.

      Once finished, the results of the experiments will be analysed and data-crunched by our scientific team, examined by a neutral statistician, and then published on the website and in subsequent printings of this book. The website will thus become the living sequel to the book you are holding in your hands. You simply need to consult the website periodically for announcements of the date of every experiment.

      Hundreds of well-designed studies of group intention and remote mental influence have demonstrated significant results. Nevertheless, it might be the case that our experiments will not produce demon-strable, measurable effects, at first or indeed ever. As reputable scientists and objective researchers, we are duty-bound to report the data we have. As with all science, failure is instructive, helping us to refine the design of the experiments and the premises that they are based upon.

      As you read this book, keep in mind that this is a work of frontier science. Science is a relentless process of self-correction. Assumptions originally considered as fact must often ultimately be discarded. Many – indeed, most – of the conclusions drawn in this book are bound to be amended or refined at a later date.

      By reading this book and participating in its experiments you may well contribute to the world’s knowledge, and possibly further a paradigm shift in our understanding of how the world works. Indeed, the power of mass intention may ultimately be the force that shifts the tide towards repair and renewal of the planet. When combined with hundreds of thousands of others, your solitary voice, now one barely audible note, could transmute into a thunderous symphony.

      My own motive for writing The Intention Experiment was to make a statement about the extraordinary nature and power of consciousness. It may prove true that a single collective, directed thought is all it takes to change the world.

      Notes - Introduction

1. For a complete description of these scientists and their findings, consult L. McTaggart, The Field: the Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe, London: HarperCollins, 2001.

2. The full title of Newton’s major treatise is Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, a name that offers a nod to its philosophical implications, although it is always referred to reverentially as the Principia.

3. R. P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: The Fundamentals of Physics Explained, London: Penguin, 1995: 24.

4. McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.

5. Eugene Wigner, the Hungarian-born American physicist who received a Nobel Prize for his contribution to the theory of quantum physics, is one of the early pioneers of the central role of consciousness in determining reality and argued, through a thought experiment called ‘Wigner’s friend’, that the observer, ‘the friend’, might collapse Schrödinger’s famous cat into a single state or, like the cat itself, remain in a state of superposition until another ‘friend’ comes into the lab. Other proponents of ‘the observer effect’ include John Eccles and Evan Harris Walker. John Wheeler is credited with espousing the theory that the universe is participatory: it only exists because we happen to be looking at it.

6. McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.

7. E. J. Squires, ‘Many views of one world – an interpretation of quantum theory’, European Journal of Physics, 1987; 8: 173.

8. B. F. Malle et al., Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.

9. M. Schlitz, ‘Intentionality in healing: mapping the integration of body, mind, and spirit’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 1995; 1 (5): 119–20.

10. R. G. Jahn et al., ‘Correlations of random binary sequences with prestated operator intention: a review of a 12-year program’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1997; 11: 345–67.

11. R. G. Jahn et al., ‘Correlations of random binary sequences’, op. cit.; Dean Radin and Roger Nelson, ‘Evidence for consciousness-related anomalies in random physical systems’, Foundations of Physics, 1989; 19 (12): 1499–514; McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 116–17.

12. These studies are itemized in great detail in D. Benor, Spiritual Healing, Volume 1, Southfield, Mich.: Vision Publications, 1992.

13. Rene Peoc’h, ‘Psychokinetic action of young chicks on the path of a “illuminated source”’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1995; 9 (2): 223; R. Peoc’h, ‘Chicken imprinting and the tychoscope: An Anpsi experiment’, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 1988; 55: 1; R. Peoc’h, ‘Psychokinesis experiments with human and animal subjects upon a robot moving at random’, The Journal of Parapsychology, September 1, 2002.

14. William G. Braud and Marilyn J. Schlitz, ‘Consciousness interactions with remote biological systems: anomalous intentionality effects’, Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1991; 2 (1): 1–27; McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 128–9.

15. Marilyn Schlitz and William Braud, ‘Distant intentionality and healing: assessing the evidence’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 1997; 3 (6): 62–73.

16. William Braud and Marilyn Schlitz, ‘A methodology for the objective study of transpersonal imagery’, Journal of Scientific