I just received information about a fascinating study carried out by Francesca McCarney, Ph.D., a teacher of professional intuitives at the Academy of Intuitive Studies and Intuition Medicine. She was inspired to create this study in 2000, when one of her students of healing and the American-based mentor, began to encapsulate’ healing intention to the other in emails.

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.

I am thrilled to announce that psychologist Dr. Gary Schwartz of the University of Arizona is partnering with us to conduct a new Intention Experiment, which will build on all the experiments that we have done thus far.

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.

Plans are growing for our Peace Intention Experiment, which is fast turning into a ‘Live Aid’ of Intention Experiments, with the potential of hundreds of thousands of participants.

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.

We’re now busy organizing the last details for our Water Purification Experiment on November 30 at 5pm on GMT.

If you don’t know how to “Power Up”, please sign up for your free “Intention Exercises”. You’ll also get full information on how to participate in the experiment.

On the day, we’ll have you click on early so you can review the procedure. It’s very simple. We’ll be sending positive intention to some
water, and the scientists -

Dr. Konstantin Korotkov, professor of physics at the St. Petersburg State Technical University in St. Petersburg Russia, and his team will have his equipment running constantly to monitor pH and light emissions.

They won’t even know what day we are sending intention. Only after he’s tallied his data will I break the code and tell him when we sent intention. He will examine whether our intention managed to change the pH of the polluted water sample

REMEMBER: for this to work, we need participants. Please tell all your friends to mark their calendars and join in on the Water Intention Experiment on November 30 at the following time zones:
Time zones for The Water Experiment

5 pm Greenwich Mean Time
12 noon US/Eastern
11 am US/Central
10 am Canada/Mountain
9 am US/Pacific
7 am US/Hawaii
6 pm Western Europe
4 am Sunday Australia/Sydney

I’ve just got off the phone with Rustum Roy, who has an exciting meeting planned with a Belgium company tomorrow. This company is worked with the Finnish materials physicist, Kiva Rainen, who has developed equipment with the unique ability to capture all parameters of water.

As you may remember, we are interested in examining whether intention changes the molecular structure of water. With our April 26 study with Penn State University, we tried to ascertain whether there were any changes in the structural organization of our water sample by looking for any changes in the scattering of light waves through our water sample.

Part of the picture

As you remember, our experiment isn’t conclusive – largely because we’re only looking at one parameter to see if it has changes.

This is a little like looking at an elephant from one side. If you look from the front, you will mainly see a trunk. Look from bottom, and you only see a giant mass hovering over you like a dark grey cloud.

Rainen’s new equipment consists of three separate devices that examine, respectively, the light scattering, the thermal expansion and any infrared changes in a sample of water. Once these measurements are taken, they are sent into a computer, and from this handful of data points, the computer can determine some 1000 parameters of the sample.

“This equipment represents a revolution in characterizing water,” says Roy.

The power of weak bonds

Professor Roy, who as combed the literature of the properties of pure water, has found that the way in which molecules cluster together can vary enormously. For instance, water can contain molecular clusters of up to several hundred H2O units apiece.

However, as he has written, these consist not only of hydrogen bonds but a wide range of very weak bonds (known as van der Waals bonds’ for all you science boffins).

“It is this range of very weak bonds that could account for the remarkable ease of changing the structure of water, which in turn could help explain the half dozen well-known anomalies in its properties,” writes Roy.

“In its subtler form, such weak bonds would also allow for the changes of structure caused by electric and magnetic fields and by radiation of all kinds, including possibly so-called ‘subtle energies’, which are the basis of an enormous range of claims about specially ‘structured’ water,” he says.

As Victor Frankel wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, we can only understand something by looking at it from different perspectives. Rainen’s tool may offer us a way to ‘trangulate’ our perception of these subtle bonds in water so that we are able to see what exactly about it has changed through intention.

For the first time we’ll be able to see the whole elephant.

This is important, in terms of determining the power of intention, because it is ‘structure (not composition) that largely controls properties and structures can easily be changed. . . without any change of composition,” says Roy.

A perfect example of this is diamond and graphite. Both share identical composition, yet diamond is one of the hardest substances on earth and graphite one of the softest.

We will be repeating the Water Experiment as soon as Professor Roy approves of and gets hold of this equipment, so we’ll keep you posted about the date to write on your calendar.