Book: The Intention Experiment
by author Lynne McTaggartt
Author Dan Brown's new book, The Lost Symbol, features the work of Lynne McTaggart with her intention experiment and work with global consciousness. As host of the Explore Your Spirit with Kala Show, Kala Ambrose speaks with authors and researchers, delving into topics of ancient mysteries, metaphysical explorations and new discoveries from science and spiritual arenas. Transcribed here is an interview Kala conducted with Lynne McTaggart about her books - The Intention Experiment and The Field and her work on the study of thought and consciousness. *Special Thanks to TaDa Transcripts for providing the transcript of this Explore Your Spirit audio interview.
Kala: Welcome to the Explore Your Spirit with Kala Show. I’m your host Kala Ambrose. On today's show, we’re speaking with Lynne McTaggart, award winning author of the best selling sensation The Field and The Intention Experiment. Lynne’s best known as the founder and editor of the UK and US’s leading publisher of newsletters and books on alternative health and spirituality, including the book, What Doctors Don’t Tell You. Lynne has become one of the most well respected international spokespersons on consciousness, the new physics, and the practices of conventional and alternative medicine. Lynne, welcome to the Explore Your Spirit show.
Lynne: Thank you.
Kala: It’s wonderful to have you back on. We had you on last year to discuss your work and your book - The Intention Experiment. Now I’m looking forward to discussing The Field with you and giving an update on all of your work.
Lynne: Well great. Thank you so much.
Kala: Tell us about The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe and the difference in how that evolved from The Intention Experiment.
Lynne: Okay. Well actually, The Field came first, in the sense that, I was kind of minding my own business running a health newsletter, and this was really in the mid 90’s. I studied medical literature every week. In the course of doing that, I kept finding studies that were looking at things like homeopathy and spiritual healing. These were really good scientific studies showing the stuff works. So, I kept thinking to myself that if this is true, then there must be something missing in our understanding of the way the world works. I’d love to find out a bit more about this. So I talked my publishers into funding, basically a voyage without a compass.
I went and started talking to scientists around the world to ask them if they could give me some information about whether or not there are human energy fields, which is what I thought it was. As I did that, it occurred to me that I was witness to a new science in the making and the old science, the science that we are all familiar with and that governs our lives, was crumbling right before my eyes. So, I began writing this and putting this together and also I realized that these scientists -- it’s hard for them to communicate this because they speak in codes—they speak in Math. So, the job of really turning this into English was left to me. Also, scientists don’t like to speculate beyond their own experimental data. Once again, in order to synthesize it, I realized that I was going to have to do this.
It was a fairly daunting project, but after I finished it, and I can tell you I actually felt many times that I would never finish and it was very odd to me that it all did get done at one point, when it just started to come to me, it began to feel like it was happening through me and not something that I was really in charge of.
As this occurred and as this happened, it also occurred to me that some of the tenents of these new ideas really upended everything in the way that we believe our world works and how we should live in the society. Number one, the first aspect of it was the fact that we are all part of a universal energy field, we’re all part of this field. If that’s true, we’re all connected at the under code of our being. If that’s true, then it really kind of goes against all of the structures that we’ve created, which are based on separation. We create our educational system by honoring the individual and encouraging and fostering competition in the competitive spirit. We create businesses on this similar model that foster competition, that have a sense that there isn’t really enough to go around, that you have to fight for things and it’s a dog eat dog world. The same things with even in our societal structures, our towns, cities, and countries are very much based on a competitive spirit. So, it occurred to me that if we were to live according to the new science, then we have start creating new transformative models for living. That’s really what I’m working on at the moment with Living the Field.
Kala: That’s what is so amazing about humanity, there are so many people who understand this at the core level and try to live by it as best they can and embrace these ideas. Yet we speak to other people who completely disagree and think there’s no connection here. It looks to me like you’re trying to bridge that gap through science and engage a little more of both sides into the conversation, is that what you’re doing?
Lynne: Absolutely. I think that what I tried to do, because I’m a layperson and I’m not a scientist, I’m trying to bridge that gap between science and spirit. I mean, there are many, many people who have said to me, “At last, there’s some science to support my belief.” They may have made a lot of intuitive beliefs, but western minds like to have proof. I offered this science of spirit, in a sense. On the other hand, as one scientist said to me recently, I offered the spirit of science, too, the spirituality of science. That looking at the real gee wiz aspect of science, the fact that, “My goodness, these are the real philosophical, metaphysical, spiritual implications of these discoveries. That’s really what I look at too.
Kala: It’s my understanding that you do work and consult with some of the leading edge scientists in this realm including Dean Radin, Marilyn Schlitz and Rupert Sheldrake and other scientists of that note; is that right?
Lynne: Yes, they’re real good buddies. I have spoken with them and they tutored me a lot in a lot of this material early on. We have wonderful discussions about what this really means and what are the implications of all of this. I speak with scientists around the world and now with the Intention Experiments, our global laboratory, I work with them. I provide, in a sense, the experimental participants or experiments.
Kala: I really like the focus that you do in the Intention Experiment, as well. There’s been some knowledge or information that has come out that talked about how we can use our thoughts to attract things to us, or to make a difference. To me, they were focused on getting a parking space, or wealth, or certain things like that. I like that your work really goes more towards healing, helping people, and reaching out in a global and public way for the betterment of all.
Lynne: Well, I think some of the difficulties in trying to do films and things on this area is that you have focus on the material, because it’s hard to demonstrate it any other way. But, I think sometimes people, in looking at manifestations, focus on the material with it and think, “Oh great. This is all around so I can get a bigger car”.
I think that there are people who talked about using the law of attraction and using these kinds of universal laws to be happy in one’s life also talked about giving back. And that gets lost; the whole idea that’s its kind of circular, you give and you get. So, our work is very much focused on sending as well as receiving. It’s also about trying to look at—and this is what we are studying in our Intention Experiment, that we’re doing the global intention experiment that everybody’s being involved in is that we’re looking at what happens when lots of people are thinking the same thought at the same time and testing that with philanthropic targets? So, what I will be talking about later are some of the targets that we started with, which were very simple, to show you that we could have a massive effect. Now, we’re moving on to targets that have huge, huge, huge implications for the way that we can use collective thought to heal the planet.
Kala: I think I’ve heard that you have to hear something seven times for it to register in your mind and start to become a belief. So, perhaps that’s what’s happening is that some knowledge came out about this, about the law of attraction and those types of things, to get people excited. You’re following up with that now with your books, information, and research to further plant it to people’s minds.
Lynne: Yes and offering conditions. One of the things that I was very interested in was looking at what conditions makes somebody a good intender and what conditions make somebody able to tap into the field? Some people are under the misapprehension that if you just have some happy thoughts, all of this will come to you. While happy thoughts are wonderful, I interviewed many, many masters of intention, like Buddhist Monks, Chi Gong Masters, and master healers, and all of them had certain commonality they used. They had certain methods of focusing their minds, certain emotional states, certain conditions and surroundings and all kinds of things like that made them better intenders; and so from all of their individual techniques, I distilled a simple program that everybody can use to become an experienced intender. So, one of the other things that I want to emphasize is intention is a matter of practice, experience counts. So, when people make use of intentions, when they use programs like the one I have in The Intention Experiment, they can become better, they become themselves eventually, a master of intention.
Kala: I couldn’t agree more. I have a mystery school here in the US where I teach esoteric teachings. One of the core beliefs is to understand and connect with thoughts and emotional states, like you refer to with the teachers of energy and the masters of chi. It is wonderful to think happy thoughts, but you really have to walk the talk and step into that world and believe them and then take action on it and then live as if they already exist today, rather than thinking of them as a dream or something that you wish to happen in the future.
Lynne: Yes, exactly. That’s one other thing is just the whole idea that it is already happened and that you’re part of this continuum of energy and that you don’t have to – you're really looking at time here. That you already existing in that mode and that seems to help bring it about. We certainly know with the studies of master athletes, in elite athletes they engage in this kind of mental rehearsal all the time.
Kala: Absolutely.
Lynne: Because there’s plenty of evidence showing that the brain can’t really distinguish between a thought and an action, and it sets up the same neural pathway to the muscles that it would do if you’re actually carrying out the action. So it is truly rehearsal in every way, it rehearses the body, and in the same way, in that sense you’re rehearsing the universe when you’re imagining that things have already happened.
Kala: Mystics have been teaching for years that time is a third dimension reality only. The mind goes so much further as to the consciousness in the soul. Science I think is catching up to this understanding with quantum physics. The point being, as soon as we say “I want”, or “I wish” we're basically at that point discounting it and say that "it "does not exist for us at this time.
Lynne: I know, exactly.
Kala: Let’s give out your websites for those who are listening to the show on their computer. You can learn more about Lynne at theIntentionExperiment.com, and LivingtheField.com
Lynne: LivingtheField.com, thanks Kala. That’s the one that’s into more all embracing and it looks at how to bring this tenets into your life and that’s the work that I’m really engaged in now, I’m looking very much at and teaching how to bring these ideas into your daily life. So, we’re carrying on with a bunch of seminars we’re holding in America this year. In all parts of America which are big intensive demonstrating really what are tools for personal transformation. How do you take these new ideas in the new science and live with intention.
I’ve heard from thousands of people who want to know how do they live the field. So, we have been working on this for four years. I’ve been working with my team and my husband in putting together a very comprehensive course that looks at all kinds of areas of living the field from extending human potential. By that I mean learning how to use your powers beyond the senses; remote viewing, ESP, dream prrecognition. All of those kinds of things are information that you receive beyond your five senses. Part of our program is honoring and learning about that. We’ve also looked at the science of energy peeling. We’ve looked at the science and the art of intention and we’ve looked at bringing the field into relationship with your children, into your work, everywhere, instead of creating yourself at a competitive instinct, creating a cooperative instinct. So, what we are starting with is Living with Intention, our first series of workshops, which are really showing how to take intention in every area of your life, and how to be involved in conscious living, which means living with intent all the time. Bringing intention to your relationship, understanding how you’re receiving information all the time whether you know it or not. Knowing what to do about negative intention; your own and other people’s, knowing how to see if you can even apply retro intention, sending an intention to affect something that has already occurred. So, we’ll look at that and looking at how you do intention, how you become a master of intention.
Kala: Tell us about the pilot experiment for The Intention Experiment. How did it all start for you?
Lynne: Well, it really started with just something we were trying out. I talked to one of my scientist who is a German physicist, Fritz Albert Popp. I more or less flew over there and I talked him into running a very simple experiment. Fritz Popp is the discoverer of tiny light missions that come out of all living things. Popp knows and has theorized, and now this theory has been backed up by a lot of experimental evidence now that this light is both a transmitter of information globally in individual bodies, but also a mechanism of transfer of information between organisms. So that two fleas – he has evidence demonstrating that even tiny organisms like fleas are sending and receiving information back and forth from each other via this light at every moment. When we were discussing this, he said, “Let’s just see if we can change these light emissions.” So, we started out thinking that we were just going to send intention to algae, which is a little deflating for me, because when I first thought of using group intention to change something, I thought of curing cancer, I didn’t want to change the light emissions of algae; that wasn’t really turning my lights on. But, he convinced me that we had to start small. So, we decided to do algae, but then we decided to have four targets. We decided to have two different kinds of algae; a Jade plant and a woman, and that we would stress all of the targets. So we added vinegar into the solution in which the algae was, we put a pin through one of the leaves on the plant and we gave the woman three cups of coffee. Now we were going to turn on all of the sensitive equipment that Popp has to record light emissions photon by photon and run it for six hours and he would not know when we are sending intentions. So we should have some sort of strange zigzag effect, because we were going do it half hour for ten minutes on, ten minutes off, in a two hour period.
So, I gathered together sixteen meditators, who were very experienced meditators, from one of our conferences. I had them come to meet me in London one night and we sent intention to all four targets. All I had was photo of these people; of these targets. So I had a photo of the Jade plant and I had the photo of the woman. I didn’t have the photo of the algae. I had a photo of some algae in Popp’s office, which I had photographed when I went there, but not the algae, which makes it really interesting, because after we finished it, Popp does all of his calculations he doesn’t know when we send in intentions. When he finishes, he asks me to tell him when and I do and he says, “Wow! That’s really great, because there are definite changes in the emission in all of the subjects at those times.” So we ended up having an effect. But it was a crude little experiment; one thing that was very interesting, was that our meditaters picked up all kinds of information about the target. They picked up, for instance, that the woman was wrapped in a blanket, that she was sleeping during the experiment, that she had a problem with her throat periodically, that she was a singer and that she had a gastro intestinal problem somebody picked up, which was true, because she said her gut really started working after three cups of coffee.
There were number of things that people were intuitively picking up but we had as I say, this was a crude first try. So, then after the book came out, I got in contact with Dr. Gary Shwartz and said, “Would you like to do a first intention experiment?” Very generously he said “yes.” Based on the first thing we’d done, he said, “Let’s do a leaf” and I again was a bit deflated because I realize that was going to have to try to turn the global mind on fire and I didn’t think that I was going to with a leaf.
Gary like Fritz Popp, said to me, we're trying something that’s never been done, we’re asking people all around the world to participate. We don’t what kind of effect we're going to have, so let's start small. Once again we'll try to do this iight emission but this time we'll have a control. So, this time we had two leaves and for the first experiment, we ran it when we ran a conference of ours, The Intention Experiment. I showed them two leaves, the people in the audience, an audience of about 400 in London chose one leaf, and the scientists back in Tucson, Arizona, where the leaves were, didn’t know which one we’d chosen. Both of them were on the webcam, we chose one and we send intention just for ten minutes to it and our intention was to make the light increase, to make it glow, glow and glow. Dr. Schwartz was great because he has very sensitive equipment that can photograph this light, photon by photon and also present a whole picture of it that you can both calculate the light and he can calculate how many photons are coming out but also photograph the whole image. He uses the quick ccd cameras that are made to take pictures of very same lights in outer space, so this was really fantastic. We had this amazing equipment that could show us any difference in bold relief. So I finally un-blind the study that after he had done the pictures and seen and he says to me, “You won’t believe it, the leaf that we’ve sent intention is glowing". It truly is glowing! And the leaf not sent intention to is dark”. So here was our first experiment and we had an actual picture, some evidence that was going on here.
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