The Field

by Lynne McTaggart

  The other inviolate notion from classical physics is the notion that the world is a geometric place filled with solid objects with spaces in between them. The size of the space in between determined the kind of influence one object had on another. Things couldn’t have any kind of instantaneous influence if they happened to be miles away.

  The Pat Price studies and the PEAR studies began to suggest that at a more fundamental level of existence, there is no space or time, no obvious cause and effect – of something hitting something else and causing an event over time or space. Newtonian ideas of an absolute time and space or even Einstein’s view of a relative space-time are replaced by a truer picture – that the universe exists in some vast ‘here’ where here represents all points of space and time at a single instant. If subatomic particles can interact across all space and time, then so might the larger matter they compose. In the quantum world of The Field, a subatomic world of pure potential, life exists as one enormous present. ‘Take time out of it,’ Robert Jahn was fond of saying, ‘and it all makes sense.’

  Jahn had his own store of evidence showing that people could foretell events. Largely because of similar work conducted by Brenda Dunne at Mundelein College, Dunne and Jahn had designed most of their remote viewing studies as ‘precognitive remote perception’, or PRP. The remote viewers remaining behind in the PEAR lab were asked to name their traveling partner’s destinations not only before they actually got there, but also many hours or days before they even knew where they were going. Someone not involved in the experiment would use a REG to randomly pick the traveler’s destinations from a pool of previously chosen targets, or the traveler could choose the destination spontaneously and on his own, after setting off. The traveling partner would then follow the standard protocol of remote viewing experiments. He’d spend 10 to 15 minutes at the target site, at the assigned time, recording his impressions of it, taking photos and following the checklist of questions produced by the PEAR team. Meanwhile, back at the laboratory, the remote viewer would have to record and draw his or her impressions of the traveler’s destination, from half an hour to five days before the traveler arrived.

  Of PEAR’s 336 formal trials involving remote viewing, the majority were set up as PRP or ‘retrocognition’ – hours or days after the traveler had left his destination – and were just as successful as those carried out in ‘real time’.

  Many of the recipients’ descriptions matched the traveler’s photographs with breathtaking accuracy. In one case, the traveler headed to the Northwest Railroad Station in Glencoe, Illinois, and took one photo of the station with an oncoming train and then another of the inside of the station, a drab little waiting room with a bulletin board below a sign. ‘I see the train station,’ wrote the remote viewer 35 minutes before the traveler had even chosen where he was going, ‘one of the commuter train stations that’s on the expressway – the white cement of them and the silver railings. I see a train coming … I see or hear the clicking of feet or shoes on the wooden floor. ... There are posters or something up, some kinds of advertisements or posters on the wall in the train station. I see the benches. Getting the image of a sign …’

  In another instance, the remote viewer at the PEAR lab jotted down his ‘strange yet persistent’ image that the agent was standing inside a ‘large bowl’ – and ‘if it was full of soup [the agent] would be the size of a large dumpling’. Forty-five minutes later, the traveler was indeed the size of a dumpling in comparison to the massive curved dome-like structure of the radio telescope in Kitt Peak, Arizona, he was standing under. Yet another PEAR participant described his partner in a ‘old building’ with ‘windows like arches’ which ‘come to a point on top almost’ but ‘not a regular point’, plus ‘great big double doors’ and ‘square pillars with balls on top’. Nearly a day later, the traveler arrived at his destination, the Tretiakovskaia Gallereia in Moscow, an ornate impressive building with special pillars in front, and a large double door beneath a pointed archway.4

  In other cases, the remote viewer picked up an impression of a scene on the traveler’s journey other than the ‘official’ one. On one occasion, the traveler intended to visit the Saturn moon rocket at the NASA Space Center in Houston, Texas. The remote viewer, meanwhile, ‘saw’ an indoor scene where the traveler was playing on the floor with a group of puppies. But that same evening, the traveler (who knew nothing of the remote viewer’s impressions) visited a friend’s home, where he did indeed play with a litter of newborn puppies, one of which he was prompted to take home with him.

  The remote viewers even picked up information about events or scenes that had distracted their travelers from their main targets. One traveler, standing on a farm in Idaho and concentrating on a herd of cows, was distracted by an irrigation ditch several yards down the road. He was sufficiently fascinated by the ditch to photograph it and note it in his description. The remote viewer in New Jersey, picking up the scene before it had happened, made no mention of cows at all in his description, but he did say that he was getting an image of farm buildings, fields and the irrigation ditch.5

  Other scientific evidence supported the idea that human beings have the ability to ‘see’ the future. The Maimonides Center’s Charles Honorton put together a review of all well-conducted scientific experiments of most varieties. Usually they entailed having participants guess which lamps would light, what card symbols would be turned up, what number on a set of dice would be thrown or even what the weather might be.6 Combining a total of 2 million trials comprising 309 studies and 50,000 participants, where the time between guessing and the event ranged from a few milliseconds to an entire year, Honorton found positive results with odds against them occurring by chance of ten million billion billion to one.7

  President Abraham Lincoln dreamed about his own assassination a week before he died. This is one of many good stories about premonitions and dreams foretelling the future that have entered into history. The problem for most scientists is how to test stories like this in the laboratory. How do you quantify and control for a premonition?

  The Maimonides dream laboratory had attempted just this – to reproduce people’s dreams about their own futures in a credible scientific experiment. They’d come up with a novel procedure, using a gifted English psychic called Malcolm Bessent. Bessent had honed his special talent, studying many years at the London College of Psychic Studies under equally gifted and experienced hands in ESP and clairvoyance. Bessent was invited to sleep at the Maimonides laboratory, where he was asked to dream about what would happen to him the following day. During the night, he would be awakened and asked to report and record his dreams. In one instance, Bessent had followed the agreed procedure for reporting his dream. The next morning, another investigator who’d had no knowledge or contact with Bessent or his dream carried out the agreed procedure for randomly selecting a target among some art reproductions of paintings. It turned out to be Van Gogh’s Hospital Corridor at Saint-Remy. As a further precaution against bias, the tape of Bessent’s recounting of his dream had been wrapped up and mailed to a transcriber before the picture had been chosen.

  As soon as the image was chosen, the Maimonides staff went into high gear. When Bessent woke up and left the sleep room, he was greeted by staff in white coats, who called him ‘Mr Van Gogh’ and treated him in a rough, perfunctory manner. As he walked along the corridor he could hear the sound of hysterical laughter. The ‘doctors’ forced him to take a pill and ‘disinfected’ him with a swab of cotton.

  Later, the transcript of his description of his dream was examined. It turned out that Bessent had described a patient attempting to escape, while many people dressed in white coats – doctors and other medical staff – were hostile to him.8

  Bessent’s laboratory premonitions had been highly successful, with seven of a total of eight considered right on target. In a second series, Bessent proved he was able to successfully dream about future targets as well as those he’d just seen. By the time the dream
lab was closed in 1978 through lack of funding, they’d amassed 379 trials, with an astonishing 83.5 per cent success rate of present and future dreams.9

  Dean Radin thought of a novel twist for how to test for a premonition. Instead of relying on verbal accuracy, he’d test whether our bodies were registering any foreboding of an event. This idea was a simplified variation on the dream research. The Maimonides tests were expensive, requiring eight to ten people and a day or so for each experiment. With Radin’s protocol, you could get the same results in 20 minutes, at a fraction of the cost.

  Radin was part of the small inner circle of consciousness investigators, and one of the only scientists who’d deliberately chosen this field of investigation rather than coming to it through the back door. His involvement in this particular brand of research had to do with the peculiar marriage his life had made of science and science fiction. Radin was 50, but despite the presence of a thin black moustache and a receding hairline, he’d retained the knowing, childlike look of the child prodigy he’d once been. His particular instrument of precocity had been the violin, which he’d played from the age of five up until his mid-twenties. Only lack of physical stamina had caused him give up what might have been a promising career as a concert violinist. World-class musical performance requires nothing less than a superb athlete willing to practice and play for hours every day, honing the mechanics of fine motor control, and Radin came to realize that nothing in his spare physical makeup possessed that level of robustness. It was natural that he would move on to his next great love, fairy tales – the prospect of a secret, magical world. But the same type of precision and detachment that had led to his competence with the violin also made for a skillful investigator, a natural for studying forensic evidence or digging out elusive clues. His first-grade teacher noted the matter-of-fact forthrightness and seriousness of purpose in this slight child and correctly forecast his future vocation. What Radin really wanted to bring into his own juvenile laboratory was magic. He’d wanted to take magic apart and study it under a microscope. By the age of twelve he’d already begun carrying out his own ESP investigations.

  Through ten years of university schooling, first in engineering, then a doctorate in psychology, and even a first job in the human factors division of Bell Laboratories, the workings of consciousness and the outer limits of human potential continued to be his chief passion. He’d heard of Helmut Schmidt’s machines, and before long he paid Schmidt a visit and came away with a borrowed RNG to conduct some studies of his own. Almost immediately, Radin began getting good results – results as good as Schmidt’s. This was too important to be a career sideline. Radin lobbied to work with some of the scientists already in this field, and began doing the rounds, at one point working at SRI and then at Princeton University before setting up his own consciousness laboratory at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, a remote academic outpost where he hoped he might be left alone.10

  Radin’s initial contribution to this research was the hard statistical grind. Much of his earlier work entailed replicating or providing mathematical verification of the research of his colleagues. It was he who’d worked out the meta-analysis of the PEAR REG studies, among others.

  Radin had studied the dream-research data that existed on premonitions. What interested him was whether people had the same sort of clear foreboding when they were awake. In his lab in Las Vegas, Dean set up a computer that would randomly select photos designed either to calm or to agitate, arouse or upset the participant. Radin’s volunteers would be wired up to physiological monitors that recorded changes in skin conductance, heart rate and blood pressure.

  The computer would randomly display color photos of tranquil scenes (pictures of nature or landscapes) or scenes designed to shock or to arouse (pictures from autopsies or erotic materials). As expected, the participant’s body would calm down immediately after he or she observed the tranquil scenes, and become aroused after being confronted by the erotic or disturbing. Naturally, study participants recorded the largest response once they’d seen the photos. However, what Radin discovered was that his subjects were also anticipating what they were about to see, registering physiological responses before they’d seen the photo. As if trying to brace themselves, their responses were highest before they saw an image that was disturbing. Blood pressure would drop in the extremities about a second before the image was flashed. Strangest of all, possibly reflecting that Americans are more unsettled about sex than violence, Radin discovered a far higher foreboding with the erotic than with the violent. He realized that he had some of the first laboratory proof that our bodies unconsciously anticipate and act out our own future emotional states. It also suggested that the ‘nervous system is not just “reacting” to a future shock, but is also working out the emotional meaning of it’.11

  Radin’s studies were successfully replicated by his Dutch counterpart, a psychologist called Dick Bierman at the University of Amsterdam.12 Bier-man went on to use this model to determine whether people anticipate good or bad news. In studying the electrodermal activity of people involved in another published study which was examining learned response in a particular type of gambling card game, Bierman found that the participants registered rapid changes in EDA response before they were handed out their cards. Furthermore, these differences tended to correspond to the type of cards they got. Those about to receive a bad hand were more rattled and had all the hallmarks of a heightened fight-or-flight response.13 This would seem to indicate that, on a subconscious physiological level, we have an inkling when we are about to receive bad news or when bad things are going to happen to us.

  Radin tried another test of seeing into the future using a variation on Helmut Schmidt’s machine. This type of machine was a ‘pseudo random event generator’, still unpredictable, but through a different mechanism. In this instance, a seed number, or initiating number, would kick off a highly complex mathematical sequence of other numbers. The machine contained 10,000 different seed numbers and so 10,000 different mathematical possibilities. The pseudorandom number generator was designed to produce sequences of random bits, or zeros and ones. Those sequences with the most ‘ones’ in them were deemed the best sequences and there-fore the most desirable. The object was to stop the machine at a particular moment, on a particular seed number, to initiate the best sequences.

  That, of course, was the trick of it. The window of selection was impossibly small; as the clock in the computer ticks 50 times a second, your correct seed number would flash up in 20 millisecond windows – ten times faster than the reaction times of human beings. To be successful at this, somehow you had to intuitively know that a good seed number was coming up and press the machine down precisely at that exact millisecond. As impossible as it sounded, this was exactly what Radin and his SRI boss, Ed May, did. Over hundreds of trials, Radin and May were somehow able to ‘know’ just when to hit the button to achieve the favorable sequence.14

  Helmut Schmidt was consumed by a delicious possibility: the prospect of turning back time. He’d been thinking about how the effects he’d been seeing with machines seemed to defy space or causation. What began taking shape in Schmidt’s mind was almost an absurdity of a question: whether a person attempting to affect the output of one of his machines could do so after it had been run. If a quantum state was as ethereal as a fluttering butterfly, did it matter when you tried to pin it down, so long as you were the first to attempt it – the first observer?

  Schmidt rewired his REG to connect it to an audio device so that it would randomly set off a click, which would be taped to be heard in a set of headphones by either the left or right ear. He then turned on his machines and taperecorded their output, making sure that no one, including himself, was listening. A copy of the master tape was made, again with no one listening, and locked away. Schmidt also intermittently created tapes that were to act as controls, those where no one would ever try to affect its left – right clicks. As expected, when they were played, these control ta
pes had left and right ear clicks that were more or less evenly distributed.

  Then, a day later, Schmidt got a volunteer to take one of the tapes home. His assignment was to listen to it and try to influence more of the clicks to come into his right ear. Later, Schmidt had his computer count up left and right clicks. His result seemed to defy common sense. What he found was that this influencer had changed the output of the machine, just as if he’d been present when it was being recorded in the first place. Furthermore, these results were just as good as his ordinary REG tests, as good as if someone had been sitting in front of the machine.

  After carrying out a number of these tests, Schmidt realized that an effect was going on, but he didn’t think his participants had changed the past, or erased a tape and made a new one. What seemed to have happened was that his influencers had changed what had happened in the first place. Their influence had reached back in time and affected the randomness of the machine at the time it was first recorded. They didn’t change what had happened; they affected what would have happened in the first place. Present or future intentions act on initial probabilities and determine what events actually come into being.

  Over more than 20,000 trials in five studies between 1971 and 1975, Schmidt showed that a highly significant number of tapes deviated from what was expected – roughly 50 per cent each of left and right clicks. He got similar results using machines that moved a needle on a dial, left or right. Of 832 runs, nearly 55 per cent had more left-hand needle moves than right.15 Of all the studies on time travel, Schmidt’s were probably the safest. Since a copy of the results had been made and locked away, it eliminated the possibility of fraud. What they showed decisively was that PK effects on a random system like a REG machine can occur at any time, past or future.

  Schmidt also found that it was important for the influencer to be the first observer. If anyone else heard the tape first and listened with focused attention, the system seemed to make it less susceptible to influence later. Any form of focused attention seemed to freeze the system into final being. A few sparse studies even suggest that observation by any living system, human or even animal, seemed to successfully block future attempts at time-displaced influence. Although these types of studies have been thin on the ground, they accord with what we know about the observer effect in quantum theory. It suggests that observation by living observers brings things into some sort of set being.16