Like all science, even the simplest experiments take a good deal of planning and many steps to carry them out. Here’s how we did it, and here’s what happened.

Preparation
Five days before the Saturday experiment, Mark filled up two 300 ml beakers (labeled “Beaker #1” and “Beaker #2”) with simple Tucson tap water.

Two days before the experiment, I wrote “Beaker #1” and “Beaker #2” on two pieces of paper, folded them, juggled them about, and chose one at random. Usually my youngest daughter performs this crucial part of the experiment for me, but this time, she was at school so I stepped in.

The target turned out to be Beaker #2, below:

Here’s the actual recording setup with the sensors, holders, Vernier PC interface, and computer.

I immediately emailed the photo of the beaker to my web team at CopperStrings, located in India, who were preparing our experiment pages. Each Intention Experiment gets assembled using the expertise of people from three continents, which just goes to show what an international effort this is.

As with all our experiments, both Mark and Dr. Schwartz were deliberately ‘blinded’ — they did not know which beaker was selected as the target for distant global intention until after the experiment was finished and they’d performed their calculations.

The twenty-minute experiment
On January 30, the Intention Experiment was carried out for 20 minutes in total: a five-minute period to ‘Power Up’ (following the special program I developed to focus the mind and heart); a five- minute ‘Instruction’ period to read about water pH, why we were doing this intention and how the experiment would work; and then the 10- minute period of the actual experiment, where the image of Beaker 2 was revealed to our participants, who were told to hold a specific intention to lower the pH of the water by at least 1 pH measure.

As with all our recent experiments, our Copperstrings web team control all the pages, so that they flip over automatically during the experiment. As usual, one of the team was on hand for two hours before the experiment started to well afterward, and we had virtually no reports of problems in participating.

We also asked our participants to focus on an image of pH scale and to imagine the water’s pH moving toward the acidic (or red) side of the scale. During the intention, the participants were instructed to imagine the water tasting more like wine and to do so with all their five senses.

Meanwhile, Mark, back in Tucson, then took recordings of pH and temperature twice every second for five minutes before our experiment started, during all the time of our Power Up period, Instruction period, and Intention period, and for five minutes after the experiment. In total, his equipment monitored pH and temperature in the two beakers for a half hour.

Beside this ACTIVE Experiment (where we were actually sending intention), the following week, the Tucson scientists set up an identical DUMMY Experiment. In this experiment, they designated Beaker #2 as the ‘intention’ beaker, and ran the entire experiment for the exact same length of time, but this time there were no participants, no procedure on the web and no intention sent to either beaker.

Having a DUMMY Experiment provides scientists with more information, in order to control for any variables.

Our results
Here’s the simple raw data of pH and temperature of the two beakers, recorded by the sensors and then displayed by the Logger Pro software, for first the ACTIVE and then the DUMMY Experiments.

ACTIVE EXPERIMENT (our actual Water into Wine Experiment) (Fig.1)

DUMMY EXPERIMENT (Fig.2)

The upper graph in the ACTIVE Experiment chart represents the pH data for the two beakers and the lower graph represents the temperature data, plotted for that half hour period before, during and after the experiment.

The red line in the first graph represents the pH reading for Beaker #2 (our target), and the blue line its temperature. The green line is the pH and orange squiggle the temperature reading of Beaker #1 — the control.

In the DUMMY Experiment, the scientists imitated the real experiment exactly, by designating Beaker #2 the ‘target’ and Beaker #1 the ‘control’.

The same colors apply to pH and temperature for the two beakers in this DUMMY Experiment.

Note that as soon as Mark inserted the pH sensors, the pH rose rapidly and then began to stabilize.

You’ll also note Beaker #2 was always slightly cooler than Beaker #1 (in both Experiments), which may have had something to do with the placement of the beakers relative to the computer monitor.

During both experiments, the temperature in both beakers decreased as time went on. Nevertheless, it began to recover in the DUMMY Experiment more than in the ACTIVE Experiment.

Studying the results more closely
In order to carefully analyze our results, Mark and Dr. Schwartz then thin-sliced the time frame further, so that even the subtlest of changes would show up more clearly. Here are the graphs for pH for the ACTIVE and DUMMY Experiments, shown below.

In this expanded scale, it is now easy to see that the pH of our target Beaker #2 (the red line) is consistently lower than that of Beaker #1 (the green line) for both sessions, again possibly because of the position of the two beakers relative to the computer monitor.

ACTIVE Session pH (Fig. 3)

DUMMY Session pH (Fig. 4)

Nevertheless, a close examination of the 10-minute Intention period reveals a slight decrease in pH for the Target Beaker #2 (red) compared to the Control Beaker #1 (green). Interestingly, the five-minute Instruction period (directly preceding the 10-minute Intention period), and the five-minute Post-intention period both show pH increasing for the Target Beaker compared with the Control Beaker.

These patterns are less prominent in the DUMMY Experiment’s results for pH, which stayed relatively steady through the entire Experiment (fig. 4).

Temperature changes
The next two sets of graphs show the data for temperature — again examined in closer detail for a clearer snapshot of any subtle changes.

ACTIVE Experiment Temperature (Fig. 5)

DUMMY Experiment Temperature (Fig. 6)

Close examination of these two sets of graphs again reveals a subtle but meaningful trend, says Dr. Schwartz. In our actual ACTIVE Experiment (Fig. 5), the temperature of the Targeted Beaker #2 (shown in blue) decreases between the first half and the second half of the ten- minute Intention Period. The Control Beaker #1’s temperature (shown in orange) stayed relatively steady.

In other words, our decrease in pH during the exact time we sent intention was paralleled by a small but measurable decrease in temperature (compared to the matched control).

Furthermore, as you can see in the graph, the decreased temperature is maintained in the five-minute Post-intention period.

The difference between Targeted and Non-Targeted beakers is clearer in the ACTIVE Experiment (Fig. 5), when compared to the DUMMY Experiment (Fig.6). In the Dummy Experiment, the the Targeted and Non-Targeted beakers show a consistent and parallel path throughout the experiment, including a decrease over the ten-minute “intention” period – even though, of course, no intention was actually sent for that experiment.

Furthermore, during the five-minute Post-intention period, the temperature in both beakers moved in the opposite direction to that of our Target Beaker. The temperature rose in both beakers in the DUMMY Experiment, whereas the temperature fell with the Target of our ACTUAL Experiment.

What does this all mean?
It means, quite simply, that we had a small, positive result — a measurable lowering of both pH and temperature in our TARGET beaker, compared to the control of the ACTIVE Experiment and the two beakers in the DUMMY Experiment.

“The trends observed in this exploratory experiment are consistent with our prediction that global distant intention to lower the pH of tap water could have a measurable effect on decreasing the pH of water in a controlled, blinded experiment,” Dr. Schwartz concluded.

Furthermore, the effects were observed exactly during the 10-minute window of our Intention. “Moreover, adds Dr. Schwartz, “these effects were paralleled in the temperature of tap water, and were observed in both the Intention and POST periods,” he adds.

Although the effects were small (a part of a pH and a degree of temperature) it’s well to remember that subtle changes in pH or temperature can improve or disturb a live body of water – or indeed an entire ecosystem damaged by modern pollution. We do well to realize that just a change of a half pH in our bodies would cause life-threatening illness, if not kill us.

In this, our first exploratory experiment into pH, we discovered that positioning of the beakers may matter, as Beaker #2 had consistently lower pH and temperature values than Beaker #1 in both our ACTIVE and DUMMY Experiments.

Nevertheless, the observed effects of our intention on the pH and temperature were larger than any possible effects from position, Dr. Schwartz concludes.

As we replicate this experiment in the future, we’ll get enough data to control for position. We’ll also examine the pH levels over longer periods of time to determine whether our changes remain constant.

Our thanks and blessings to Dr. Schwartz, Mark and their entire University of Arizona lab and also to our web team at Copperstrings for pulling off a flawless experiment.

So this, our 19th experiment, is also our 16th successful Intention Experiment – demonstrating, once again, that our collective thoughts have the power to change – perhaps even heal – our world. Every experiment brings us that much closer to understanding what intention can and cannot do.

What happens next?
It’s time to focus, for the first time, on a real live target — namely a real and highly polluted body of water. I’m partnering with Masaru Emoto and four prominent scientists (to run four Intention Experiments on Lake Biwa, near Kyoto in Japan on March 22, which also happens to be the United Nation’s World Water Day. See: http://lakebiwaevent.com if you would like to come to this historic event. And stay tuned for more information about our planned simultaneous Intention Experiment, which I hope to run live over the internet so that all of you can take part.

For all of you who didn’t register, we can now reveal our target as the Wanni (or north) section of Sri Lanka.  This area of the world has suffered a civil war for 25 years, with more suicide bombings than anywhere on earth.  The Wanni section is the stronghold of the rebel Tamil Tigers, the well-armed rebel forces.

We’re delighted that  at least 11,468 people took part at different times during the week (many more who couldn’t log onto the sites also joined in, and we will tally them soon).  We enjoyed participation in more than 65 countries  and every continent but Antartica, with the top 10 countries ranking as follows: United States, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, South Africa, Germany, Australia, Belgium Spain and Mexico.

Nevertheless, intenders also came from many far-flung quarters, from Trinidad, Mongolia and Nepal to Guadeloupe, Indonesia, Malia, Dominican Republic and Ecuador. People participated from all manner of computers, not only PCs and Macs, but also iPhones, iPods and Danger Hiptops.

So, heartfelt thanks to all of you, and we’ll make sure to give Australia a friendlier time of the day with the next experiment.

Big press in Sri Lanka

Although this was simply a pilot, our Peace Intention Experiment was given a great deal of newspaper and television press in Sri Lanka and indeed around the world.

We have been working with the noted Peace advocate Dr. Kumar Rupesinghe, the Gandhi of Sri Lanka, whose organization has supplied us with the weekly figures for war related deaths, abductions, injuries and attacks for the past two years for our study.

What happens now

From these statistics, our scientists, most especially Jessica Utts, professor of Statistics at University of California at Irvine, will model a prediction of the likely average violence levels we should expect over the coming month, if the fighting carries on as normal.  Up until now, the Wanni section of Sri Lanka has averaged 102 deaths per week. We will then compare this model of what should happen to what did happen over a month.  The difference in the two numbers, plus some control of variables, will tell us if our intention had any influence in lowering all levels of violence.  This will require at least a month, as we gather the statistics and then compare them with our model.

We will report our findings to all of you soon thereafter.  Our latest information is that the fighting had intensified at the start of our experiment, as the government attacked the LTTE rebel stronghold, the UN suddenly sent in a peace keeper and the fighting may be diminishing.  Our careful monitoring of the situation will tell us more.

For those of you in the Peace Intention Experiment, you are not on our e-news list and want to find out what happened, please sign up here.

What you can do in the meantime

Many of you who participated wrote about the extraordinary and palpable experience you had participating in this experiment and would like to run further ‘experiments’.  Here’s how you can keep the process going:

• Join our Intentions of the Week. The Intention Experiment runs weekly Intentions of the Week for a worthy recipient with a health challenge nominated by one of our readers. We have helped a large number of people, from those with serious illnesses like cancer and those suffering life-threatening accidents, to runaway teenagers, who simply require more love and understanding. We are now planning to monitor our results and supply feedback. To participate, just follow the instructions here.  If you’d like to nominate a loved one with health challenge or other extreme difficulty, simply supply us with a recent photo, plus his or her full name, age, location and detailed nature of difficulty to: cs@livingthefield.com.

• Help Sri Lanka. Please join Dr. Rupesinghe’s No to Violence campaign, his Foundation for Co-existence or his Sahajeevana Center for Co-existence, which offers information on peace education.

• Share your experiences with us. If you haven’t already, please tell us or send in your diary of experiences on our Intention Experiment site so we can compile information about what happened to our participants during the experiments.

• Monitor the effects of the Peace Intention Experiment in  your own life. Have you discovered that your own relationships are more peaceful following the Peace intention Experiment?  If so, please write in and tell us: cs@livingthefield.com

• Support our work. My husband Bryan and I have paid for the Intention Experiments to date and allocated a number of our employees to handle various aspects of the process.  For the Peace Intention Experiment, we also relied upon the kindness of organizations like Intentional Chocolate (who paid for the server space) and Copperstrings, our wonderful web folk who supplied us with the pages for the experiment without charge.

But to carry on, we need your support.  We have big plans for the Peace Intention Experiment.  Although this was just a pilot, we’d like to roll out this experiment so that hundreds of thousands participate next time.  To do this, we need big server power.  Here’s how you can help:

• Buy (and read) The Intention Experiment. Your support of my book supports this work and helps to pay for these experiments. (Plus, you will learn about the science of intention and discover a full program of how to maximize your own intention.)

• Buy our other products. We have a vast range of products on health, spirituality and personal development, including our Living the Field masterclass and downloads.  For a complete listing, click here.  Buying a product goes a long way toward supporting us.

• Donate. If you prefer to make a straight donation to the project, just click here.  Please write us at cs@livingthefield.com if you require a receipt for a tax deduction.

First of all, you will register on the main page of the Peace Intention Experiment site (www.thepeaceintentionexperiment.com).

If you haven’t registered yet, but want to participate, please do so TODAY.

Then, on the day, come onto the site 10-15 minutes before the experiment is due to start. Sign in on the home page.  If you haven’t registered yet, you may sign up then.

So, let’s say, you live in New York and you know that the experiment is starting at 12 noon your time.  You should come onto the site no later than 11:50.

Once you sign in, you’ll be taken to a page with instructions about POWERING UP.  You’ll stay there for five minutes in order to get into a relaxed, meditative state.

While you are waiting for the Peace Intention Experiment to start, please POWER UP.  We’ll supply all the instructions.

So, still assuming you’re from New York, at 12:05 pm the page will automatically flip over to the next page.

The next page will reveal our chosen target – an area in the world with some of the highest levels of sustained war-related deaths.  Please read this page carefully. We’ve supplied a map and some graphic images of the fighting there so you can take the images of suffering into your heart.

You will remain on that page for five more minutes.

So, at 10 past the hour, the page will automatically flip over again.  You’ll be sent to a third page, with the exact wording of the intention and some beautiful images of the country and of all ethnic groups in the country getting along.  At that point, the experiment begins.

You’ll be asked to hold the intention statement in your mind for 10 minutes, while music plays (Jonathan Goldman’s Choku Rei – our signature Intention music).

At the end of 10 minutes, the music will stop and the page will flip over a final time, to a link with our forum page, where you can go to share your experience with our international participants.

I look forward to joining you on Sunday.

Please post any questions below.

In order to get robust experimental results, I was interested in choosing an area that the West was NOT focused on. Many areas of violence around the world are already the subject of prayer groups and intention; if we were to focus on one of them, it would be more difficult to demonstrate scientifically that the Peace Intention Experiment had a significant effect in lowering violence.

But one issue was foremost in making my final selection:  it had to be an area where accurate daily records of violence had been kept for at least two years.  It also had to be an area where violence and war-related deaths were being tracked virtually in ‘real time’ so we wouldn’t have to wait for months to find out if our week of intention had an effect.

My team of scientists will be carrying out a time analysis of the data.  To do this, they will examine the two years of past data and from that model their prediction of what will happen in the week of our intention and the month afterward.  We’ll then compare our predicted levels with the actual levels of violence.  If the actual levels are significantly lower, it will suggest that our intentions for peace had an effect.

Exhaustive search

Finding data this detailed and up to date proved to be an enormous challenge.  For weeks I contacted conflict resolution and peace organizations around the planet:  The Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland; the Human Security Report Project at Simon Fraser University’s School for International Studies at Vancouver, Washington; the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, to name just a few.  Many organizations like these had collected data, but it wasn’t being collected anymore.  Or it wasn’t particularly up to date.

What I apparently needed to look for was an Early Warning System – an organization gathering real time data on murder and violent crimes as a means of letting governments and other bodies know that conflict was threatening to disrupt in a particular area. My trail of inquiry eventually led me to the Swiss Peace Foundation.

They seemed perfect with the perfect worldwide database, until I discovered that they’d lost their funding in the middle of this year.

Calling Jack Bauer

I then heard about the National Counterterrorist Center – a real live, ’24-style’ counterterrorist unit, which exists within the US State department.  They have a Worldwide Incidents Tracking System, which tracks terrorist activity and terrorist-related deaths everywhere on the planet. I thought I’d hit paydirt.  It was just what I needed.

Nevertheless, when I went onto the WITS, I found that the listings were only provided as recently March 2008.  Nevertheless, I thought that getting accurate stats would simply be a matter of contacting them – until I tried to get through to them.  There was no phone number for the NCC on their website and no phone number in directory assistance.

I then phoned the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence and after three tries, got hold of a number of the NCC. The NCC apparently wasn’t interested in dealing with the public.

Although the person answering that telephone number announced himself merely as ‘Customer Service’, he guardedly admitted I’d got hold of the right department.  When I was finally put through to the WITS, I got hold of a receptionist with attitude, who first asked my full name, address and telephone number before firmly informing me that no one in their department would speak with me but her, and, no, I couldn’t have any more recent data than was on the website.

I’d spent weeks digging and not only was I no closer to finding a source of good data, but I was probably now on a State Department hotlist somewhere for my interest in daily worldwide terrorist activity.

I began calling researchers on all these organizations and a long list of others, until I located a few other Early Warning systems for a number of less likely targets (I’m not going to tell you where because I don’t want you to start thinking about the target yet).  Suffice it to say that in certain parts of the world, even cattle rustling is being tracked on a daily basis.

This latest search led me to what appeared to be the perfect foundation keeping track of daily incidents within its country, although there was no contact details for it on the website.

Eventually, after more exhaustive research, I came up with the student who’d been the program manager of the early warning system.  It so happened that he’d attended a master’s course in America, and so his email address was on the web.  Eventually I discovered it, and when I contacted him, he gave me the contact details of the head of the foundation — a prominent promoter of peace in his country, who turned out to be fascinated by our experiment and very interested in helping.  It just so happens that his organization is carrying out a candle-lighting peace initiative which begins on September 21 – the very day our week of intention ends.

Some paths, however divergent, are eventually meant to converge.

The Chosen Target

I’m delighted to say that after weeks and weeks of calling, writing, pleading and digging through every possible Early Warning System, worldwide terrorist tracking system and government ‘incident’ count, I’ve finally located the very perfect target.  This part of the world has been suffering from heavy violence and civil war for a number of decades.  Nevertheless, a wonderful organization has blossomed in this terrible war-torn area and not only promoted peace, but also tracked every single act of violence of a number of years.  They also have a system that tracks incidents immediately after they occur. The head of this organization is a well-known advocate for peace, with huge stature.

But here’s the best part of all.  It so happens that they have a special peace campaign that they are initiating on September 21 with a special ceremony, with a special symbol of peace everyone can display in their homes.  I’m not going to tell you anymore about this initiative until we begin our first Peace Intention Experiment because I don’t want to give away the target (remember:  I don’t want you to think about it beforehand).  But we not only have a week of intention; we also have a ceremony we can participate in to help this country and this worthwhile campaign. I will reveal all when the experiment starts.

SIGN UP TODAY FOR THE PEACE INTENTION EXPERIMENT

If you haven’t yet registered, please do so today by clicking here.

The Peace Intention Experiment will begin running on September 14 and will run for one week.  It will run at the same time every day:

• 7 am Hawaiian Daylight Savings Time
• 9 am California Daylight Savings Time
• 10 am Mountain Daylight Savings Time
• 11 am Central DST
• 12 noon Eastern DST
• 5 pm British Summer Time
• 6 pm European Summer Time
• 2 am Sydney and Melbourne

For all other time zones corresponding with 4 pm Greenwich Mean Time, click here.

Here’s how to participate:

• REGISTER on our home page: www.thepeaceintentionexperiment.com.  The most important first step is to register so that we know exactly how many people are participating every day.
• WAIT for our instructions, which will be sent you by email.  If you don’t get instructions by September 7, email us at: cs@livingthefield.com.  We’ll give you some exercises to do to become practiced at intention.
• READ The Intention Experiment, by Lynne McTaggart, if you’d like the full information about the science of intention and how to master intention.  Note:  you don’t have to buy the book to participate, but doing so helps you to become an intention master. It also helps us to defray the costs involved in setting up a scientific experiment and the enormous web bandwidth involved.
• COMMENT ON THIS SITE. Tell us your views about this project! You’ll be joining with the thousands of others around the world who looking forward to participating.
• WRITE DOWN the new website address. We’ve created special web pages for the experiment that are NOT on this website, so that we can cope with the huge traffic expected throughout the week.
• MAKE NOTE of the right time zone corresponding with 12 noon Eastern Daylight Savings Time (or 4 pm Greenwich Mean Time).  That’s the time you’ll send intention each day that you can participate throughout the week.
• PLAN to spend 10 minutes sending intention during that period, plus the time preparing to POWER UP.

On September 14, and every day thereafter through September 21:

• COME ONTO THE NEW SITE 15 minutes or more before the experiment begins.
• LOGON WITH YOUR PASSWORD. We need you to register/logon every single time, so we can track exactly who is participating.
• IF YOU PLAN TO PARTICIPATE WITH A GROUP, make sure all of you sign in.  We’re arranged it so you can all sign on the same computer.
• FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS on the pages, which will automatically flip forward so that you are in synch with everyone.

Immediately after the experiment each day:

• CLICK THROUGH TO OUR FORUM after the experiment, and join with thousands of others to discuss your experience.

Please try to make the effort to participate every day.  I am trying to keep a critical mass of at least 7000 people on the site every day.

If you can’t participate every day, come on every day that you can.  Remember, you’ll need to put your password in on our special Peace Intention Experiment website in order to get through to the site, so we’ll be counting our participants every day.

I also spent a great deal of time speaking with my team of scientists to examine many of the issues involved in setting up the Peace Intention Experiment.

As a mass group experiment to promote peace in a particular hotspot has never been tried before, at least in the very rigorous way that we’re planning, the biggest challenge is to figure out how exactly this experiment should be run.

For the first one, we have to set up a hypothesis and then test it.  If it works, we’ll know we have modelled our study well. If it doesn’t work, we will know only that one of the following is true:

• intention can’t be used to lower violence
• our scientific model on this occasion wasn’t robust enough to yield meaningful data.

In other words, with any scientific experiment, you start out by stumbling in the dark.

Help from TM studies

Happily, in this instance we have some scientific work that will help to light our way. As you may know, the Transcendental Meditation organization carried out a great number of systematic studies examining whether the passive act of meditation in a particular area, when carried out by a large group of people, can have an effect on lowering violence levels and also terrorist activities. Many of their studies showed a 10-20 per cent drop in violence levels in particular areas populated by a critical number of meditators.  Their studies have been analyzed by a team of statisticians and published in reputable scientific journals.

These studies are invaluable to us because

1. they worked  – the TM people repeatedly witnessed highly significant, repeatable results in domestic cities and foreign locales
2. they used a particular and repeated scientific design and analysis.

Examining their study design can give the Peace Intention Experiment a basis blueprint that we can tailor for our purposes.  And our work, in effect, will extend theirs.

Besides the scientists on my panel, I spoke at length with David Orme-Johnson, one of the architects of the TM studies, and John Davies, of the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland.  Davies worked with Orme-Johnson in helping to find the statistics used for the TM studies, and has offered a great deal of information about how to find reliable data.

The most important question of all that we have had to consider over the last two months in designing this first experiment is simply this:

How long should we send intention?

Should we do our customary 10 minutes, or more?  And should we just send intention one time, or more than once? And if so, how many times?

Jessica Utts, the professor of statistics at the University of California at Davis who will be analyzing this data of the Peace Intention Experiment, says that just seeing one dip in the statistics (corresponding to the time we sent intention) isn’t going to be very impressive. We need to see a sustainable dip, or a series of spikes corresponding to times we send intention, for our experiment to be statistically convincing.

All the Intention Experiments run to date have asked participants to send intention for just 10 minutes. Nevertheless, in those instances, we’ve sent intention to a simple target — a jar of water, a leaf, a set of seeds – and tried to change something simple.

With those experiments, we were taking baby steps. We’re now about to take a giant leap in terms of the complexity of our target.

Gary Schwartz, the professor of psychology at the University of Arizona who has partnered with me on the early experiments, believes that a single 10-minute intention is almost certain to fail with the Peace Intention Experiment.  He argues strongly that our intention needs to be sustained over some days or be run at random intervals.  That way, if we see spikes in our data corresponding with times we send intention, we’ll know that our intentions are having an effect.

In the TM studies, the minimum amount of time for meditation was 40 minutes, although they also ran studies examining the effect of 7000 people in the same place carrying out daily bouts of meditation for 10 minutes.

Nevertheless, the meditators were always asked to meditate over a sustained time period – one week to one month.

That suggests to us that our 10-minute model can work when carried out over a number of days.

Same time, same place for one week

So for this first study, it’s likely that we’ll ask you to send intention every day for 10 minutes at the same time for one week.  If this is finally agreed (and we’re still working on study design), we’ll ask you to come on our site at the same time every day (see below) for a week to send the same intention to the same target.

We’re still working out the times, but it’s likely they will be the following:

• 9 am Pacific Daylight Savings time

• 12 noon Eastern Daylight Savings time

• 5 pm British summer time

• 6 pm European summer time

All other main time zones will be listed and sent to you

Critical mass

John Davies and I discussed something else interesting about use of the internet for this experiment.  The TM studies discovered positive effects with two group sizes.  When 1 per cent of the population in any given area was meditating, the crime rate went down.

Nevertheless, when the square root of 1 per cent of the population was together in the same place, this also had a positive effect on lowering violence.  In the experiments with international terrorist levels, the TM people were able to lower terrorist action when 7000 people t were meditating at the same site.  At the time, 7000 represented the square root of 1 per cent of the population.

In a sense, by gathering together on our website all at the same moment, we will be, in a sense, in the same ‘place’.  If we have 8000 participants or more, we will have the square root of 1 per cent of the world’s current population.  At the moment 5000 have already signed up and that figure is going up by hundreds every day.

So please, if you haven’t signed up already, do so here. And get all your likeminded friends to participate as well. Let’s surpass the TM’s definition of a critical mass and speak with one thunderous voice.

Our website is now ready for anyone wanting to sign up for our Global Peace Intention Experiment on September 14 2008 – to sign up, click here.

The experiment will be the first in a series of Peace Intention Experiments testing the power of group intention to lower violence in areas around the world.

This could be the largest scientific study in history, with hundreds of thousands of participants sending an intention for peace under highly controlled scientific conditions.

I’ve assembled a scientific advisory body of leaders in consciousness research, to devise a strict protocol and measure violence levels before and after the intention is sent to see if there is any effect.

This team includes:

• Dr. Robert Jahn, former dean of engineering at Princeton University and director of the PEAR Lab,
• Psychologist Brenda Dunne, also of the PEAR Lab
• Psychologist Gary Schwartz of the University of Arizona, and director of the Laboratory for Advancement of Consciousness and Health, who has run many healing energy experiments
• Psychologist Roger Nelson, formerly of Princeton University, and director of the Global Consciousness Project
• Dr. Jessica Utts, professor of statistics at the University of California at Davis, considered the world’s leading statistician of consciousness research

We’re currently building our team of technical experts who will make sure we have a reliable web platform from which to run the experiment – so that you and hundreds of thousands of intenders across the world can join together at the same time via our website.

The first step is to sign up today – click here to put your name down, and we’ll get in touch with further information about how to participate.

After a time, they discovered that their healing energy was having an effect at the time intended by the sender – regardless of when it was sent and the fact that it was sent from thousands of miles away.

“When the student would read the text message with the information describing the healing action that the mentor had facilitated, she became aware that she began to feel the changes while she read the message, or realized that she had already received the pertinent energy-information previous to reading the actual email message,” writes Francesca.

For Francesca’s own study she asked a professional intuitive to encapsulate three healing energy treatments into a CD-ROM, which held a text email message. In the study, Francesca created four different email treatments, three with healing energy encapsulated into it and one without.

Each of the 88 test participants received one of the three energy emails and one ‘no energy’ email, via a computer program, which randomly transmitted the emails. Their job was to detect and identify those emails with the encapsulated healing energy, and which type, and to discern which emails had no energy embedded in it. The participants were to use one or more intuitive skills (such as telepathy) to intuit the kind of
healing energy in the email.

Overall, the participants correctly identified the emails 31.9 per cent of the time. Since they had a 25 per cent chance of success through pure chance, scientists would consider it highly significant
result.

Your intention Experiment via email

Here’s a fun experiment that you can carry out with your friends or loved ones. Try to embed a simple intention – even word like ‘dog’ — by Powering Up first, meditating on the word and then embedding the thought into your email. Don’t actually write the word in your email.

Send the email to your friend, explaining what you have done, and see if he or she can guess the word. Have them Power Up first, and then try to feel the word.

Please write in with any results here.

In this new experiment, we will be using water to ‘send instructions’ to our barley seeds to grow faster and more healthily than normal.

Building on our Germination Experiment

This new study will build on what we’ve learned about water and about intention and seeds thus far. We’ve now run three water experiments, showing that intention has an effect that appears to change the structure of water and we’ve run six experiments which together decisively show that intention can make seeds sprout earlier and grow faster.

With this new experiment, we will test whether we can charge the water used to water the seeds with the intention and whether this will affect the growth of the seeds.

This experiment builds on the work of Canadian psychologist Bernard Grad, who carried out several studies examining whether the mental state and intentions of someone holding the water would affect the growth of plants. In one study he showed that seeds irrigated with water held by a healer had a faster germination rate and growth than controls and in another that water held by psychotics retarded its growth.

We’ll also be giving a firm scientific footing to the work of Masaru Emoto, who carried out many demonstrations showing that water sent love changes its crystalline structure.

Now we’ll test how that water affects the real world. We’re also planning to look at this work in two stages: how intention in water affects short-term germination and growth; and now it affects the plant over time.

We will be setting the date for our experiment for July, so please keep reading.

Your own Intention Experiment: try holding water before you water your plants and send it a positive intention with a specific outcome. Please report your results here.

We have now set a date of September 14 for the Peace Intention Experiment, so put it in your diary today and if you haven’t already, please register at www.theintentionexperiment.com.

These will be the start of an ambitious series of scientific studies to determine whether ‘group mind’ has the power to lower violence in areas chosen for high crime and violence levels.

We are working closely with the Association for Global New Thought — an umbrella group of all new thought churches — and we chose September 14 to coincide with the Unity Church’s Eleven Days of Unity.

The plan is for our first target to be in the Middle East, as a fitting antidote to all the negative press that will be focused on the anniversary of 9/11. If we can get the correct violence figures from Iraq, we will make that the target.

An accidental “Live Aid”

I began thinking about running a Peace Intention Experiment more than a year ago. The plan was to have my readers send intention to a series of ‘hot spots’ around the world and to measure violence levels before and after. These experiments would build upon the original Transcendental Meditation studies, which showed that when a critical mass of people in a city meditate, the crime rate goes down.

When I mentioned this idea to Deepak Chopra, he said: ‘I’d l like our Alliance for New Humanity to be involved.’ The same occurred when I told Ananda Giri of the Oneness Foundation about the experiments. Then Barbara Fields of the AGNT got excited and offered her group’s support, and after that the Unity churches, the Spiritual Cinema Circle, plus dozens of radio shows like the World Puja Network followed suit.

Before I knew it, I was faced with the possibility of hundreds of thousands of ‘intenders’ participating in this experiment. My one little thought about a Peace experiment had grown overnight into Live Aid.

Server challenges

This ‘big idea’ of course has a number of challenges — and here’s where I need your help.

The biggest challenge of all is finding an internet system sophisticated enough to allow thousands of people around the world to open and stare at the same web page at exactly the same moment. Allowing in such sizeable simultaneous traffic requires a vast amount of extra web capacity – as Oprah Winfrey recently discovered when her web transmission of Eckhart Tolle’s seminar repeatedly crashed.

The current Intention Experiment studies run on Ning, a social network offering individual organizations instant facilities for a community-based website. This enables The Intention Experiment website to have access to some 500 linked servers.

Nevertheless, we need a better protocol and more server power to ensure that the system holds up during these giant experiments.

Two important elements of our Intention Experiments include: 1) tracking each and every participant and 2) allowing everyone to experience the feeling of ‘joining together’ at a central meeting place on the internet. Thousands of readers have remarked on the special, palpable feeling of oneness that is generated by the sense that others are there ‘on the page’ at the same time.

So we still need to be able to allow all those hundreds of thousands of people to come onto our web page at the same moment.

Web gurus: a special forum for you

That’s why I’m enlisting all you web gurus out there – to help solve the server issues or to donate server power.

I’d like to create a special Intention Experiment web forum this week for all of you to correspond with me and any other web experts who’d like to help out. Thus far, we’ve had some 10 people come forward, recommending load-balancing servers, or static pages, or even clones of the software and database.

If you have some good ideas or good connections with vast server power, and you’re interested in becoming part of a discussion group of web experts discussing ingenious ways to run this experiment, please write in to cs@livingthefield.com. We’ll be in touch shortly.

Wise elder scientists signing up

I’m also busily recruiting other gurus for the scientific arm of the experiment. Roger Nelson of the Global Consciousness Project, and Brenda Dunne (with Robert Jahn), formerly of the PEAR laboratory at Princeton University are joining Dr. Gary Schwartz and Dr. Rustum Roy as a panel of ‘wise elders’ to advise me in the design of the scientific experiments. The plan is to have such a panel with expert statisticians select both the targets and design the exact way in which the scientific experiments will run.

Besides their decades of experience in running scientific investigations into human consciousness, Nelson, Jahn and Dunne all are sticklers for detail and so will be wonderful help in devising an air-tight protocol.