The Field

by Lynne McTaggart

  Just to be sure, Elisabeth conducted fifty statistical tests to eliminate whether any other variables in the patients might have contributed to the results. This time, there were no more than chance.

  The results were inescapable. No matter which type of healing they used, no matter what their view of a higher being, the healers were dramatically contributing to the physical and psychological well-being of their patients.16

  Targ and Sicher’s results were vindicated a year later, when a study entitled MAHI (Mid-America Heart Institute) of the effect of remote intercessory prayer for hospitalized cardiac patients over 12 months showed patients had fewer adverse events and a shorter hospital stay if they were prayed for. In this study, however, the ‘intercessors’ were not gifted healers; to qualify to take part, they simply needed to believe in God and the fact that He responds when you pray to Him to heal someone who is ill. In this instance, all the participants were using some form of standard prayer and most were Christian – Protestant, Roman Catholic or non-denominational. Each was given a particular patient to pray for.

  After a month, symptoms in the prayer group had been reduced by more than 10 per cent compared with those receiving standard care, according to a special scoring system developed by three experienced cardiologists from the Mid-America Heart Institute, which rates a patient’s progress from excellent to catastrophic. Although the healing didn’t shorten their hospital stay, the patients being prayed for were definitely better off in every other regard.17

  More studies are now under way in several universities. Elisabeth herself began a trial (which, at the time of writing in 2001, is still going on) comparing the effects of distant healers with nurses, a group of health professionals whose caring attitude toward their patients might also act as a healing mechanism.18

  The MAHI study offered several important improvements over Randolf Byrd’s study. Whereas all the medical staff in Byrd’s study had been aware that a study was being carried out, the medical staff in the MAHI study had no idea.

  The MAHI patients also didn’t know they were participating in a study, so there would not have been any possible psychological effects. In Byrd’s study, of the 450 patients, nearly an eighth had refused to be involved. This meant that only those who were receptive to, or at least didn’t object to the idea of, being prayed for would have agreed to be included. Finally, in Byrd’s study, those doing the praying had been given a great deal of information about their patients, whereas in the MAHI study, the Christians had virtually no information about the people they were praying for. They were told to pray for 28 days, and that was it. They had no feedback about whether their prayers had worked.

  Neither the Targ nor the MAHI study demonstrated that God Himself answers prayers or even that He exists. As the MAHI study was quick to point out: ‘All we have observed is that when individuals outside of the hospital speak (or think) the first names of hospitalized patients with an attitude of prayer, the latter appeared to have a “better” CCU experience.’19

  In fact, in Elisabeth’s study, it didn’t seem to matter what method you used, so long as you held an intention for a patient to heal. Calling on Spider Woman, a healing grandmother star figure common in the Native American culture, was every bit as successful as calling on Jesus. Elisabeth began to analyze which healers had the most success. Their techniques had been profoundly different. One ‘flow alignment’ practitioner based in Pittsburgh felt, after attempting work with several of the patients, that there was a common energy field in all of them, which she came to think of as an ‘AIDS energy signature’, and she would work on getting in touch with their healthy immune system and ignore the ‘bad energy’. With another it was more a case of working on psychic surgery, spiritually removing the virus from their bodies. Another, a Christian in Santa Fe, who carried out the healing in front of her own altar with pictures of the Virgin and saints and many lit candles, claimed to have summoned up spirit doctors, angels and guides. Others, like the kabbalistic healer, simply focused on energy patterns.20

  But what they all seemed to have in common was an ability to get out of the way. It seemed to Elisabeth that most of them claimed to have put out their intention and then stepped back and surrendered to some other kind of healing force, as though they were opening a door and allowing something greater in. Many of the more effective ones had asked for help – from the spirit world or from the collective consciousness, or even from a religious figure such as Jesus. It was not an egoistic healing on their part, more like a request: ‘please may this person be healed’. Much of their imagery had to do with relaxing, releasing or allowing the spirit, light or love in. The actual being, whether it was Jesus or Spider Woman, appeared irrelevant.

  The success of the MAHI study suggested that healing through intention is available to ordinary people, although the healers may be more experienced or naturally talented in tapping into The Field. In the Copper Wall Project in Topeka, Kansas, a researcher named Elmer Green has shown that experienced healers have abnormally high electric field patterns during healing sessions. In his test, Green enclosed his participants in isolated rooms made with walls constructed entirely of copper, which would block electricity from any other sources. Although ordinary participants had expected electrical readings related to breathing or heartbeat, the healers were generating electrical surges higher than 60 volts during healing sessions, as measured by electrometers placed on the healers themselves and on all four walls. Video recordings of the healers showed these voltage surges had nothing to do with physical movement.21 Studies of the nature of the healing energy of Chinese Qigong masters have provided evidence of the presence of photon emission and electromagnetic fields during healing sessions.22 These sudden surges of energy may be physical evidence of a healer’s greater coherence – his ability to marshall his own quantum energy and transfer it to the less organized recipient.

  Elisabeth’s study and the work of William Braud raised a number of profound implications on the nature of illness and healing. It suggested that intention on its own heals, but that healing is also a collective force. The manner in which Targ’s healers worked would suggest that there may be a collective memory of healing spirit, which could be gathered as a medicinal force. In this model, illness can be healed through a type of collective memory. Information in The Field helps to keep the living healthy. It might even be that health and illness of individuals is, in a sense, collective. Certain epidemics might grip societies as a physical manifestation of a type of energetic hysteria.

  If intention creates health – that is, improved order – in another person, it would suggest that illness is a disturbance in the quantum fluctuations of an individual. Healing, as Popp’s work suggests, might be a matter of reprogramming individual quantum fluctuations to operate more coherently. Healing may also be seen as providing information to return the system to stability. Any one of a number of biological processes requires an exquisite cascade of processes, which would be sensitive to the tiny effects observed in the PEAR research.23

  It could also be that illness is isolation: a lack of connection with the collective health of The Field and the community. Indeed, in Elisabeth’s study, Deb Schnitta, the flow alignment practitioner from Pittsburgh, found that the AIDS virus seemed to feed on fear – the type of fear that might be experienced by anyone shunned by the community, as many homosexuals were during the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Several studies of heart patients have shown that isolation – from oneself, one’s community and one’s spirituality – rather than physical conditions, such as a high cholesterol count, is one of the greatest contributors to disease.24 In studies of longevity, those people who live longest are often not only those who believe in a higher spiritual being, but also those who have the strongest sense of belonging to a community.25

  It might mean that the intention of the healer was as important as his or her medicine. The frantic doctor who wishes his patient could cancel so he could have his lunch; the junior doctor
who has stayed up for three nights straight; the doctor who doesn’t like a particular patient – all may have a deleterious effect. It might also mean that the most important treatment any doctor can give is to hope for the health and well being of his or her patient.

  Elisabeth began to examine what was present in her consciousness just before she went in to see her patients, to make sure that she was sending out positive intentions. She also began to study healing. If it could work for Christians who didn’t know the patients they were praying for, she thought, it could also work for her.

  The modus operandi of her healers suggested the most outlandish idea of all: that individual consciousness doesn’t die. Indeed, one of the first serious laboratory studies of a group of mediums by the University of Arizona seems to validate the idea that consciousness may live on after we die. In studies carefully controlled to eliminate cheating or fraud, the mediums typically were able to produce more than eighty pieces of information about deceased relatives, from names and personal oddities to the actual and detailed nature of their deaths. Overall, the mediums achieved an accuracy rate of 83 per cent – and one had even been right 93 per cent of the time. A control group of non-mediums were only right, on average, 36 per cent of the time. In one case, a medium was able to recite the prayer a deceased mother used to recite for one of the sitters as a child. As Professor Gary Schwarz, who led the team, said, ‘The most parsimonious explanation is that the mediums are in direct communication with the deceased.’26

  As Fritz-Albert Popp described it, when we die we experience a ‘decoupling’ of our frequency from the matter of our cells. Death may be merely a matter of going home or, more precisely, staying behind – returning to The Field.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Telegram from Gaia

  IT HAD TO BE the most gripping moment Dean Radin could think of, and nothing, he decided, was more gripping than the end of the O.J. Simpson trial, which had overtaken the Scopes ‘monkey’ trial as the American trial of the century. From the moment that the white Ford Bronco had skittishly raced along the LA freeway, tens of millions of Americans per minute had watched the drama unfold on court TV. And now, nearly a year into the trial, half a billion viewers worldwide had turned on their television sets, ready to watch the live broadcast of the fate of the Bronco’s driver, who was awaiting the jury’s verdict as to whether he had or had not brutally slashed to death his wife and her lover.

  So many Americans had remained riveted to their television sets throughout the nine and a half months of the trial, the 133 days of testimony, the 126 witnesses, the 857 exhibits entered into evidence, the issues of racism, the DNA testing and bloody gloves, the staggering blunders of the police and forensic experts, the drama when Judge Lance Ito twice threw out the television cameras and roundly chastised the two squabbling legal teams, that it had cost the American gross national product an estimated $40 billion in lost productivity. And now a year and four days after the jury had first been selected, this true-life drama which had made for so much compulsive viewing, which had cut so deeply into daytime soap opera viewing that it could command its own premium television advertising space, was about to come to an end.

  Even the final moments had their unexpected dramatic cliffhanger. Just as the jury had reached their verdict and were assembled in the courtroom, Armanda Cooley, the jury foreman, realized that she’d left the form with their verdict written on it, sealed in its envelope, in the jury room. But even if she’d had it there, two lawyers for the defense, including Johnny Cochran, the head of Simpson’s ‘dream team’ of prominent attorneys, weren’t present. Judge Ito declared a recess. The verdict would be read the following morning at 10 a.m. The world would have to wait one more day.

  On October 3, 1995, an audience greater than that for three of the five previous Superbowls or for the ‘Who shot JR?’ episode of Dallas turned on its television sets. Judge Ito asked that the verdict be passed to the court clerk, Deirdre Robertson. She and O.J. Simpson stood up. The world held its breath.

  ‘In the matter of People of the State of California vs Orenthal James Simpson, case number BA 097211. We, the jury, in the above-entitled action, find the Defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, not guilty,’ read Mrs Robertson.

  O.J. Simpson, so impassive through most of the trial, broke into a triumphant smile.

  O.J. was cleared on both counts. It was the final twist in the tale. The television audience was stunned by the jury’s decision, and so were five other silent observers – all REG computers, one at the PEAR lab, another at the University of Amsterdam and three more at the University of Nevada. They’d been set to run continuously for three hours before, during and after the reading of the verdict.

  Afterwards, Radin examined their output. Three statistically significant peaks of highs had occurred in all five computers at exactly the same three moments: a small peak at 9 a.m. Pacific time, a larger peak an hour later, and then an enormous peak seven minutes after that. These three blips corresponded to the three most important final moments of the trial: when the show first started, with the initial television commentary – the time when most people would have turned on their television sets – then the beginning of the broadcast of the actual courtroom proceedings, and finally the exact moment the verdict was announced. Like everyone else in the world, these computers had snapped to attention to find out whether O.J. was innocent or guilty.1

  The possibility that a collective consciousness might exist had been taking shape for many years in Dean Radin’s mind, perhaps even influenced by his mother, who’d been interested in yoga all those years ago. Certainly, this notion was a familiar concept in ancient and Eastern cultures. But others, like psychologist William James, had proposed that the brain simply reflects this collective intelligence, like a radio station picking up signals and transmitting them. As Radin and his colleagues observed the apparent ability of the human mind to extend its boundaries, natural questions arose about whether the effects get larger when many individuals operate in unison and indeed whether a collective global mind ever operated as a unity. If coherence could develop between individuals and their environment, was there also a possibility of group coherence?

  What was different about Radin’s thoughts was that he was trying to work out how to test it scientifically. It was Roger Nelson who had first thought to see if a REG machine could pick up evidence of a collective consciousness. The idea grew out of an experience he’d had one day while he was studying some data at the PEAR lab. It was 1993 and Nelson was a 53-year-old doctor of psychology, unofficially looked upon as the coordinator of experiments at the PEAR lab, a natural hand at directing, the fellow who got everybody together to make sure the job got done. He’d come to the lab in 1980 for a year-long sabbatical from teaching at a college in Vermont, but then one year turned into two, and before long he informed his college that he wasn’t coming back. The PEAR work was intoxicating for the Nebraska-born Nelson, red-bearded and rustic-featured, another philosopher scientist drawn, even as a child, to the scientific frontier.

  Nelson had been sitting up in the civil engineering department at Princeton, creating graphs for the distributions of the scores for multiple REG runs. As he examined the graphs for runs where people had put out one set of intentions (HIs) and graphs for the opposite intention (LOs), there was nothing out of the ordinary. As expected, the graph of the HIs was shifted a little to the left, and that of the LOs was shifted a little to the right. Roger then pulled up the statistics for the third test, when people were not supposed to have any intention toward the machine. It was supposed to be a baseline, with a shape that was virtually indistinguishable from those of pure chance when the machine was running by itself, with nobody trying to affect it. The graph was nothing like that. It was all squeezed together. In the very center, there was a neat and obvious exception, a little bar jutting up, resembling nothing so much as a clenched little fist. There it was, wagging at him in reproach. Nelson laughed so hard at it that he fell off his
chair. How could he have failed to recognize this? Even trying not to think of anything might create its own focus of energy. Your mind couldn’t help it. Intending not to have any effect on a REG machine was like trying not to think of elephants. Perhaps any sort of attention, by its very act of focusing consciousness, could create order. The mind was always carrying on – noticing, thinking.

  We think, therefore we affect.

  There had already been some evidence of this in the PEAR lab. Nelson had seen that certain people, often women, had more dramatic success in influencing the REG machines when they were concentrating on something else.2 Nelson began by testing this with a device he’d named Cont-REG – shorthand for keeping a REG machine running continuously to see if it registered any more heads or tails than usual in the ordinary course of the day and then establishing what had been going on in the room during the moments of effect.

  Out of that grew another idea. Everyday observing requires a very low state of attention. You take in many sights, sounds and smells around you in the course of your ordinary activities. However, when you do something that really engages your mind and emotions – listening to music, watching a gripping moment of theater, attending a political rally or a religious service – you concentrate with every pore of your body. You attend to it in a state of peak intensity.

  Nelson wondered first whether the ability of consciousness to order or influence depends upon how intent the observer is. And second, if it does for individuals, what would be the effect of more than one person? He’d seen from the PEAR data that bonded couples – people who were intensely involved – had a more profound effect on the REG machines than individuals. It suggested that two like-minded people created more order in a random system. Suppose you assemble an entire crowd, all focusing intently on the same thing. Would the effect be even greater? Was there a relation between the size of the crowd or the intensity of interest and the size of the effect? After all, he thought, everyone had had moments in their lives where the consciousness of a group event could almost be felt. A REG machine was so exquisitely sensitive that it might just pick up on this.