A Live Aid of scientific experiments will test the power of group mind to lower violence around the world.

Thus far in The Intention Experiment, we have taken baby steps to find out if our collective thoughts can change the world. We’ve shown in controlled scientific studies that we can change a basic physical property of leaves, make plants grow twice as high as normal, and alter the essential structure of water.

It is time to roll out this experiment to see how much we can do to heal the world.

The Peace Intention Experiment

Last year, I began to kick around the idea of having a Peace Intention Experiment – to determine whether ‘group mind’ has the power to lower violence in areas chosen for high crime and violence levels.

These ideas were sparked by the numerous Transcendental Meditation studies showing that when a critical mass of meditators regularly meditate in an area, the crime rate goes down.

Some 22 studies have tested the positive impact of the so-called Maharishi Effect on crime levels. In a study of 48 cities, those 24 cities with the requisite threshold percentages of meditators (1 per cent of the population) experienced a 22 per cent decrease in crime, and an 89 per cent reduction in the crime trend.

The TM organization has also targeted global conflict. In 1983 a special TM assembly met in Israel to send intentions through meditation to resolve the Palestinian conflict. During their sessions, they made daily comparisons between the number of meditators working on the project and the state of Arab–Israeli relations. On days with a high number of meditators, fatalities in Lebanon fell by 76 per cent. Ordinary violence – local crime, traffic accidents and fires – also all decreased.

But the TM studies mostly concern group attention. In many instances, the meditators are not people who maintain a focused intention to change something else. I wondered what would happen if a large group actually sent a highly specific intention to make a change.

Live Aid of Experiments

I first discussed it on Sirius radio, when interviewed by Deepak Chopra, and he immediately warmed to the idea and suggested that his organization, The Alliance for New Humanity, spread the word to all its members.

I was then chatting about it with a director of the Association for Global New Thought, an umbrella organization covering all the New Thought churches, and she enthusiastically offered to have all her members become involved.

Whenever I mentioned the idea to some organization, they wanted to become involved. Before I knew it, the idea had caught fire among the Unity churches and the Oneness Foundation, the Spiritual Cinema Circle and many other organizations. Suddenly we were faced with a potential of hundreds of thousands of participants sending an intention for peace under highly controlled scientific conditions.

I began to feel like Bob Geldof. Without even trying, I had a Live Aid of Intentions Experiments on my hands -- the largest scientific study in history.

The Peace Intention Experiment is to be launched on September 14, 2008, to tie in with the Unity Church’s Eleven days of Unity. The hope is that it will serve as an antidote to the 9/11 anniversary press. It is likely that the first target will be somewhere in the Middle East, if we can get accurate figures. I will not reveal where in the Middle East yet as I don’t want any intentions sent before September 14 at the appropriate time.

Over the past few months I’ve been fortunate to assemble a remarkable scientific advisory body of six leaders in consciousness research as my scientific team of ‘wise elders’, to devise a strict protocol and measure violence levels before and after the intention is sent to determine if there is any effect.

The scientific team includes:

• Dr. Robert Jahn, former dean of engineering at Princeton University and former director of the PEAR Lab
• Psychologist Brenda Dunne, also formerly 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 and intention experiments
• Psychologist Roger Nelson, formerly of Princeton University, and director of the Global Consciousness Project
• David Orme-Johnson, architect of many of the Transcendental Meditation studies, which showed that a critical mass of meditators has an effect on lowering violence levels
• Dr. Jessica Utts, professor of statistics at the University of California at Davis, considered the world’s leading statistician of consciousness research

They will be working with me in the coming months to devise a tight experimental protocol.

Web challenges

In all the experiments to date, The Intention Experiments have specified that participants register first (in order for the scientists to track the nature and size of participation) and then come together on a single web page.

The biggest challenge with these experiments 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.

For the first experiment, to ease the huge surge of web traffic created during the experiments, the Intention Experiment web teams have held the experiments on a special page, away from the main website, and webmasters have controlled the flipping over of pages, rather than having readers click to other pages themselves, so there would be no possibility of the site freezing when everyone clicked the same button at the same time.

For the latest experiments, i nstead of renting servers, we have made use of the giant capacity already created by a social network portal, like MySpace or Facebook.

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, the Peace Intention Experiment could potentially involve many hundreds of thousands of people. We have a web team examining the prospect of using coral cache load sharing. Any other ideas will be most appreciated.

Register now for the experiment

If you’d like to get involved in these historical experiments, you’ll need to sign up in order to receive our instructions for preparing ahead of time. You can do so by signing up for the Peace Intention Experiment where it says to register on our Intention Experiment site.

Please join us and tell all your friends to join the Peace Intention Experiment on September 14, 2008.

Let’s find out whether one well-directed thought is a gentle but effective way for all us ordinary people to restore peace on earth.

Lynne McTaggart, author of The Field and The Intention Experiment, is holding a series of special Living with Intention workshops in Los Angeles, Portland and Boston to teach people how to use intention to heal their lives and others. For more information or to book your place, click here.