The Field

by Lynne McTaggart

  Bob Jahn and Brenda Dunne also began playing around with time in their own REG trials. In 87,000 of their experiments, they asked their volunteers to address their attention to the machine’s operations anywhere from three days to two weeks after the machine had been allowed to run. Once they looked at the data, what they found was incredible. In every regard, this data was identical to the more conventional data they’d generated when their experimenters were attempting their influence at the time the machine was being run – the differences between women and men were still there and overall population distortions were the same. There was just one important difference. In the ‘time-displaced’ experiments, the volunteers were getting bigger effects than in the standard experiments every time they’d willed the machine to produce heads. However, because of the relatively small numbers, Jahn and Dunne had to deem this weird effect non-significant.17

  A number of other investigators tried this kind of backward time travel to influence the gerbils running in activity wheels or the direction of people walking in the dark (and hitting a photobeam), or even cars hitting a photobeam in a tunnel in Vienna during the rush hour. The revolutions on the wheels and hits of the photobeam were converted into clicks, and taped, stored and played for the first time between one day and a week later to observers, who attempted to influence the gerbils to run faster or the people or cars to run into the beam more often. Another study attempted to see if a healer could retroactively influence the spread of blood parasites in rats. Braud had even done his own studies recording the EDA response of certain individuals and asking them to review their response and try to influence their own EDAs. Radin had carried out a similar study with EDA tapes and healers. Schmidt had studies where he’d tried to affect his own prerecorded breathing rate. All told, ten of the nineteen studies showed effects significantly different from chance – enough to indicate that something out of the ordinary was going on here.18

  It was results like these that most troubled Hal Puthoff. The type of zero-point energy he was most familiar with was electromagnetic: a world of cause and effect, of order, of certain laws and limits – in this case, the speed of light. Things did not go backward or forward in time.

  This body of experiments suggested three possible scenarios to him. The first was a vision of an utterly deterministic universe, where everything that was ever going to happen had already occurred. Within this universe of absolute fixed determinacy, people with premonitions were simply tapping into information, which was, on some level, already available.

  The second possibility was perfectly explainable within known theoretic laws of the universe. Radin’s opposite number, University of Amsterdam’s Dick Bierman, believed you could account for precognition through a well-known quantum phenomenon known as retarded and advanced waves – the so-called Wheeler – Feynman absorber theory, which says that a wave can travel backward in time from the future to arrive at its source. What happens between two electrons is this. When one electron jiggles a bit, it sends out radiating waves into both the past and the future. The future wave, say, would hit a future particle, which would also wiggle, while sending out its own advanced and retarded waves. The two sets of waves from these two electrons cancel out, except in the region between them. The end result of a wave from the first traveling backward and the wave from the second traveling forward is an instantaneous connection.19 In premonitions, Radin speculated, it could be that, on a quantum level, we are sending out waves to meet our own future.20

  The third possibility, which perhaps makes the most sense, is that everything in the future already exists at some bottom-rung level in the realm of pure potential, and that in seeing into the future, or the past, we are helping to shape it and bring it into being, just as we do with a quantum entity in the present with the act of observation. An information transfer via subatomic waves doesn’t exist in time or space, but is somehow spread out and ever-present. The past and present are blurred into one vast ‘here and now’ so your brain ‘picks up’ signals and images from the past or the future. Our future already exists in some nebulous state that we may begin to actualize in the present. This makes sense if we consider that all subatomic particles exist in a state of all potential unless observed – which would include being thought about.

  Ervin Laszlo has proposed one interesting physical explanation for time-displacement. He suggests that the Zero Point Field of electromagnetic waves has its own substructure. The secondary fields caused by the motion of subatomic particles interacting with The Field are called ‘scalar’ waves, which are not electromagnetic and which don’t have direction or spin. These waves can travel far faster than the speed of light – like Puthoff’s imagined tachyons. Laszlo proposes that it is scalar waves that encode the information of space and time into a timeless, spaceless quantum shorthand of interference patterns. In Laszlo’s model, this bottom-rung level of the Zero Point Field – the mother of all fields – provides the ultimate holographic blueprint of the world for all time, past and future. It is this that we tap into when we see into the past or future.21

  To take time out of the equation, as Robert Jahn suggests, we need to take separateness out of it. Pure energy as it exists at the quantum level does not have time or space, but exists as a vast continuum of fluctuating charge. We, in a sense, are time and space. When we bring energy to conscious awareness through the act of perception, we create separate objects that exist in space through a measured continuum. By creating time and space, we create our own separateness.

  This suggests a model not unlike the implicate order of British physicist David Bohm, who theorized that everything in the world is enfolded in this ‘implicate’ state, until made explicit – a configuration, he imagined, of zero-point fluctuations.22 Bohm’s model viewed time as part of a larger reality, which could project many sequences or moments into consciousness, not necessarily in a linear order. He argued that as relativity theory says that space and time are relative and in effect a single entity (space-time) and if quantum theory stipulates that elements that are separated in space are connected and projections of a higher-dimensional reality, it follows that moments separated in time are also projections of this larger reality.

  Both in common experience and in physics, time has generally been considered to be a primary, independent and universally applicable order, perhaps the most fundamental one known to us. Now, we have been led to propose that it is secondary and that, like space, it is to be derived from a higher-dimensional ground, as a particular order. Indeed, one can further say that many such particular interrelated time orders can be derived for different sets of sequences of moments, corresponding to material systems that travel at different speeds. However, these are all dependent on a multidimensional reality that cannot be comprehended fully in terms of any time order, or set of such orders.23

  If consciousness is operating at the quantum frequency level, it would also naturally reside outside space and time, which means that we theoretically have access to information, ‘past’ and ‘future’. If humans are able to influence quantum events, this implies that we are also able to affect events or moments other than in the present.

  This suggested one final intriguing thought to William Braud. Time-displaced human intention somehow acts on the probabilities of some occurrence to bring about an outcome, and works best on what Braud liked to call ‘seed moments’ – the first of a chain of events. So, if you applied these principles to physical or mental health, it could mean that we could use The Field to direct influences ‘back in time’ to alter pivotal moments or initial conditions which later bloom into full-blown problems or disease.

  If thought in the brain is a probabilistic quantum process, as Karl Pribram and his colleagues propose, future intention might influence one neuron being fired and not another, setting off one or another chain of chemical and hormonal events that may or may not result in disease. Braud pictured a seed moment where a natural killer cell might exist in a 50 – 50 probabilistic state
to kill or ignore certain cancer cells. That simple first decision might eventually make the difference between health and illness, or even death. There may be a score of ways that we could use intention in the future to change probabilities before they develop into full-blown disease. In fact, even the diagnosis itself might influence the future course of the disease and so should be approached with caution.

  If the disease had developed, it wouldn’t be that you could undo it. But some of the most harmful aspects of it might not have been actualized yet and might still be susceptible to change. You’d catch a disease at a point where it could be swayed in many directions, from good health to death. Braud pondered whether any cases of spontaneous remission had been caused by a future intention acting upon a disease before the point of no return. It might well be that every moment of our lives influences every other moment, forward and backward. As in The Terminator films, we might be able to go back in time to affect our own future.24

  Part 3

  Tapping into the Field

  ‘The last century was the atomic age, but this one could well turn out to be the zero-point age.’

  Hal Puthoff

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Healing Field

  PUTHOFF, BRAUD AND THE other scientists had been left with an imponderable: the ultimate usefulness of the non-local effects they had observed. Their studies suggested a number of elegant metaphysical ideas about man and his relation to his world, but a number of practical considerations had been left unanswered.

  How powerful was intention as a force and exactly how ‘infectious’ was the coherence of individual consciousness? Could we actually tap into The Field to control our own health or even to heal others? Could it cure really serious diseases like cancer? Was the coherence of human consciousness responsible for psychoneuroimmunology – the healing effect of the mind on the body?

  Braud’s studies in particular suggested that human intention could be used as an extraordinarily potent healing force. It appeared that we could order the random fluctuations in the Zero Point Field and use this to establish greater ‘order’ in another person. With this type of capability, one person should be able to act as a healing conduit, allowing The Field to realign another person’s structure. Human consciousness could act as a reminder, as Fritz Popp believed, to re-establish another person’s coherence. If non-local effects could be marshalled to heal someone, then a discipline like distant healing ought to work.

  What was clearly needed was a test of these ideas in real life with a study so carefully designed that it would answer some of these questions, once and for all. In the early 1990s the opportunity arose with the perfect candidate – a scientist rather skeptical of the remote healing with a group of patients who’d been given up for dead.

  Elisabeth Targ, an orthodox psychiatrist in her early 30s, was the daughter of Russell Targ, Hal Puthoff’s partner and successor in the SRI remote-viewing experiments. Elisabeth was a curious hybrid, drawn to the possibilities suggested by her father’s remote-viewing work at SRI, but also shackled by the rigors of her scientific training. At the time, she’d been invited to work as director of the California Pacific Medical Center’s Complementary Research Institute, as a result of the remote-viewing work she’d done with her father. One of her tasks was to formally study the treatments offered by the clinic, which consisted largely of alternative medicine. Often she seemed to be teetering between both camps – wanting science to embrace and study the miraculous, and wanting alternative medicine to be more scientific.

  A number of different strands in her life began to converge. She’d received a phone call from a friend of hers, Hella Hammid, announcing that she had breast cancer. Hella had arrived in Elisabeth’s life through her father, who’d inadvertently discovered in Hella, a photographer, one of his most talented remote viewers. Hella had called to ask if Elisabeth knew of any evidence that alternative therapies such as distant healing – something not unlike remote viewing – could help to cure breast cancer.

  In the 1980s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic – a time when a diagnosis of HIV was almost certainly a death sentence – Elisabeth had chosen this specialty in San Francisco, the very epicenter of the US epidemic. At the time of Hella’s phone call, the hottest topic in medical circles in California was psychoneuroimmunology. Patients had begun to crowd into special town-hall meetings given by mind – body devotees such as Louise Hay or into workshops on visualization and imagery. Elisabeth herself had been dabbling in her own studies of mind – body medicine, undoubtedly because she’d had nothing much else to offer patients with advanced AIDS, even though she was deeply skeptical of Hay’s approach. One of her own early studies had shown that group therapy was as good as Prozac for treating depression in AIDS patients.1 She’d also read of the work of David Spiegel at Stanford Medical School, showing that group therapy dramatically increased life expectancy for women with breast cancer.2

  In her sensible, pragmatic heart, Elisabeth suspected the effect was a combination of hope and wishful thinking, and perhaps a bit of confidence engendered by the support of the group. They may have been psychologically better, but their T-cell counts certainly weren’t improving. Still, she harbored a shred of doubt, possibly derived from the years she’d spent observing her father’s work on remote viewing at SRI. His success strongly argued for the existence of some sort of extrasensory connection between people and a field that connected all things. Elisabeth herself had often wondered if one could use the special ability observed in remote viewing for something besides spying on the Soviets or predicting a horse race, as she had once done.

  Then in 1995, Elisabeth received a phone call from Fred Sicher. Fred was a psychologist, researcher and retired hospital administrator. He’d been referred to her friend Marilyn Schlitz, Braud’s old associate, who was now the director of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, the Sausalito-based organization that Edgar Mitchell had set up many years before. Fred now at last had the time in his life to investigate something that fascinated him. As a hospital administrator, he’d always been something of a philanthropist. At Schlitz’s suggestion, he approached Elisabeth about the possibility of working with him on a study of distant healing. With her unique background, Elisabeth was a natural choice to head up the study.

  Prayer was not something Elisabeth had much experience of. She had inherited from her father not only her melancholic Russian looks and thick black tresses, lightly tinged with grey, but also her passion for the microscope. The only God in the Targ family home had been the scientific method. Targ had imparted to his daughter a sense of the thrill of science, with its capability of answering the big questions. As he’d chosen to work out how the world works, so his daughter had chosen to figure out the workings of the human mind. As a 13-year-old, she’d even wangled a place working in Karl Pribram’s brain research laboratory at Stanford University, examining differences between left and right hemisphere activity, before deciding on an orthodox course of study in psychiatry at Stanford.

  Nevertheless, Elisabeth had been highly impressed by the Soviet Academy of Science during a visit she’d made there with her father, and the fact that laboratory study of parapsychology could be so openly carried out by the establishment. In officially atheist Russia, they had only two categories of belief: something was true or not true. In America, a third category existed: religion, which placed some things strictly beyond the reach of scientific investigation. Everything scientists couldn’t explain, everything connected with healing, or prayer, or the paranormal – the territory of her father’s work – seemed to fall into this third category. Once it was placed there, it was officially declared out of bounds.

  Her father had built his reputation on designing impeccable experiments, and he had taught her respect for the importance of the air-tight, well-controlled trial. She grew up believing that any sort of effect could be quantified, so long as you designed the experiment to control for variables. Indeed, Puthoff and Targ between them had demonstra
ted that the well-designed experiment could even prove the miraculous. The outcome was gospel, regardless of whether that outcome violated the researcher’s every expectation. All good experiments ‘work’: the problem is simply that we may not like the conclusions.

  Even as Targ senior shifted his thinking to embrace certain spiritual ideas, Elisabeth remained the cool rationalist. Still, throughout what was an orthodox training in psychiatry, she’d never forgotten her father’s lessons: received wisdom was the enemy of good science. As a student she would seek out dusty psychiatric writings of the nineteenth century, before the advent of modern psychopharmacology, when psychiatrists lived in sanatoriums, writing down the rantings of their patients in an attempt to gain further understanding of their conditions. Somewhere in the raw data, Targ believed, separated out from the dogma of the times, lay the truth.

  Elisabeth agreed to collaborate with Sicher, even though privately she doubted it was ever going to work. She would put distant healing to the purest test. She would try it out on her patients with advanced AIDS, a group so certain to die that nothing other than hope and prayer was open to them anymore. She would find out whether prayer and distant intention could cure the ultimate hopeless case.