Product Description

The book you hold in your hands is revolutionary, a groundbreaking exploration of the science of intention.Drawing on the findings of leading scientists from around the world, The Intention Experiment demonstrates that thought is a thing that affects other things. It is also the first book to invite you, the reader, to take an active part in its original research.

Using cutting-edge research conducted at Princeton,MIT, Stanford, and many other prestigious universities and laboratories, The Intention Experiment reveals that the universe is connected by a vast quantum energy field.Thought generates its own palpable energy, which you can use to improve your life and, when harnessed together with an interconnected group, to change the world.

In The Intention Experiment, internationally bestselling author Lynne McTaggart takes you on a gripping, mind-blowing journey to the furthest reaches of consciousness.As she narrates the exciting developments in the science of intention, she also profiles the colorful scientists and renowned pioneers who study the effects of focused group intention on scientifically quantifiable targets -- animal, plant, and human.

McTaggart offers a practical program to get in touch with your own thoughts, to increase the activity and strength of your intentions, and to begin achieving real change in your life. You are then invited to participate in an unprecedented experiment: Using The Intention Experiment website to coordinate your involvement and track results, you and other participants around the world will focus your power of intention on specific targets, giving you the opportunity to become a part of scientific history. A new Afterword by the author recounts the successes of the several Intention Experiments so far.

The Intention Experiment forces you to rethink what it is to be human. It proves that we're connected to everyone and everything -- and that discovery demands that we pay better attention to our thoughts, intentions, and actions. Here's how you can.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1792 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Review
"If you want to explore the latest science behind The Secret, look no further. Science and wisdom collide and make friends in this real-world adventure that is ultimately a guidebook for living."-- Drew Heriot, director of The Secret

"Lynne McTaggart has zeroed in on a wonderful collection of experiments and events that shatters our normal materialistic assumptions of time, space, and everything in between (if there is an in-between). It's as mind-bending as it's meant to be."-- William Arntz, producer, writer, and director of What the BLEEP Do We Know!? and author of What the BLEEP Do We Know!? - Discovering the Endless Possibilities For Altering Your Everyday Reality

"Very few books are able to transform information into inspiration--concepts into action--word into deed. The Intention Experiment does exactly that. In a style that is highly entertaining and accessible, McTaggart reminds us of an eternal truth too often overlooked: Each of us possesses the power of the Universe WITHIN. Now that is a transformational read!"-- Ward M. Powers, Filmmaker and Director, ONE: The Movie

"The Intention Experiment is an extraordinary advance in our understanding of consciousness as a field of all possibilities where intention orchestrates its own fulfillment. If you want to empower yourself and use the laws of intention to manifest your material reality, read this book." -- Deepak Chopra, author of Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment

About the Author
Lynne McTaggart is an internationally recognized spokesperson on the science of spirituality and the award-winning author of five books, including The Field, which has been published in fourteen languages. She is also co-executive director of Conatus, which publishes some of the world's most respected health and spiritual newsletters, including What Doctors Don't Tell You and Living the Field. She lives in London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

This book represents a piece of unfinished business that began in 2001 when I published a book called The Field. In the course of trying to find a scientific explanation for homeopathy and spiritual healing, I had inadvertently uncovered the makings of a new science.

During my research, I stumbled across a band of frontier scientists who had spent many years reexamining quantum physics and its extraordinary implications. Some had resurrected certain equations regarded as superfluous in standard quantum physics. These equations, which stood for the Zero Point Field, concerned the extraordinary quantum field generated by the endless passing back and forth of energy between all subatomic particles. The existence of the Field implies that all matter in the universe is connected on the subatomic level through a constant dance of quantum energy exchange.

Other evidence demonstrated that, on the most basic level, each one of us is also a packet of pulsating energy constantly interacting with this vast energy sea.

But the most heretical evidence of all concerned the role of consciousness. The well-designed experiments conducted by these scientists suggested that consciousness is a substance outside the confines of our bodies -- a highly ordered energy with the capacity to change physical matter. Directing thoughts at a target seemed capable of altering machines, cells, and, indeed, entire multicelled organisms like human beings. This mind-over-matter power even seemed to traverse time and space.

In The Field I aimed to make sense of all the ideas resulting from these disparate experiments and to synthesize them into one generalized theory. The Field created a picture of an interconnected universe and a scientific explanation for many of the most profound human mysteries, from alternative medicine and spiritual healing to extrasensory perception and the collective unconscious.

The Field apparently hit a nerve. I received hundreds of letters from readers who told me that the book had changed their lives. A writer wanted to depict me as a character in her novel. Two composers wrote musical compositions inspired by it, one of which played on the international stage. I was featured in a movie, What the Bleep!? Down the Rabbit Hole, and on the What The Bleep Do We Know!? Calendar, released by the film's producers. Quotations from The Field became the centerpiece of a printed Christmas card.

However gratifying this reaction, I felt that my own journey of discovery had hardly left the station platform. The scientific evidence I had amassed for The Field suggested something extraordinary and even disturbing: directed thought had some sort of central participatory role in creating reality.

Targeting your thoughts -- or what scientists ponderously refer to as "intention" and "intentionality" -- appeared to produce an energy potent enough to change physical reality. A simple thought seemed to have the power to change our world.

After writing The Field, I puzzled over the extent of this power and the numerous questions it raised. How, for instance, could I translate what had been confirmed in the laboratory for use in the world that I lived in? Could I stand in the middle of a railroad and, Superman-style, stop the 9:45 Metroliner with my thoughts? Could I fly myself up to fix my roof with a bit of directed thought? Would it now be possible to cross doctors and healers off my list of essential contacts, seeing as I might now be able to think myself well? Could I help my children pass their math tests just by thinking about it? If linear time and three-dimensional space didn't really exist, could I go back and erase all those moments in my life that had left me with lasting regret? And could my one puny bit of mental input do anything to change the vast catalog of suffering on the planet?

The implications of this evidence were unsettling. Should we be minding every last thought at every moment? Was a pessimist's view of the world likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy? Were all those negative thoughts -- that ongoing inner dialogue of judgment and criticism -- having any effect outside our heads?

Were there conditions that improved your chances of having a better effect with your thoughts? Would a thought work any old time or would you, your intended target, and indeed the universe itself have to be in the mood? If everything is affecting everything else at every moment, doesn't that counteract and thereby nullify any real effect?

What happens when a number of people think the same thought at the same time? Would that have an even larger effect than thoughts generated singly? Was there a threshold size that a group of like-minded intenders had to reach in order to exert the most powerful effect? Was an intention "dose dependent" -- the larger the group, the larger the effect?

An enormous body of literature, starting with Think and Grow Rich,1 by Napoleon Hill, arguably the first self-actualization guru, has been generated about the power of thought. Intention has become the latest new age buzzword. Practitioners of alternative medicine speak of helping patients heal "with intention." Even Jane Fonda writes about raising children "with intention."2

What on Earth, I wondered, was meant by "intention"? And how exactly can one become an efficient "intender"? The bulk of the popular material had been written off the cuff -- a smattering of Eastern philosophy here, a soupçon of Dale Carnegie there -- with very little scientific evidence that it worked.

To find answers to all these questions, I turned, once again, to science, scouring the scientific literature for studies on distant healing or other forms of psychokinesis, or mind over matter. I sought out international scientists who experimented with how thoughts can affect matter. The science described in The Field had been carried out mainly in the 1970s; I examined more recent discoveries in quantum physics for further clues.

I also turned to those people who had managed to master intention and who could perform the extraordinary -- spiritual healers, Buddhist monks, Qigong masters, shamans -- to be able to understand the transformational processes they underwent to be able to use their thoughts to powerful effect. I uncovered myriad ways that intention is used in real life -- in sports, for instance, and during healing modalities such as biofeedback. I studied how native populations incorporated directed thought into their daily rituals.

I then began to dig up evidence that multiple minds trained on the same target magnified the effect produced by an individual. The evidence was tantalizing, mostly gathered by the Transcendental Meditation organization, suggesting that a group of like-minded thoughts created some sort of order in the otherwise random Zero Point Field.

At that point in my journey, I ran out of pavement. All that stretched before me, as far as I could tell, was uninhabited open terrain.

Then one evening, my husband, Bryan, a natural entrepreneur in most situations, put forward what seemed to be a preposterous suggestion: "Why don't you do some group experiments yourself?"

I am not a physicist. I am not any kind of scientist. The last experiment I had conducted had been in a tenth-grade science lab.

What I did have, though, was a resource available to few scientists: a potentially huge experimental body. Group intention experiments are extraordinarily difficult to perform in an ordinary laboratory. A researcher would need to recruit thousands of participants. How would he find them? Where would he put them? How would he get them all to think the same thing at the same time?

A book's readers offer an ideal self-selected group of like-minded souls who might be willing to participate in testing out an idea. Indeed, I already had my own large population of regular readers with whom I communicated through e-news and my other spin-off activities from The Field.

I first broached the idea of carrying out my own experiment with dean emeritus of the Princeton University School of Engineering Robert Jahn and his colleague, psychologist Brenda Dunne, who run the Princeton Engineering Anomalous Research (PEAR) laboratory, both of whom I had gotten to know through my research for The Field. Jahn and Dunne have spent some thirty years painstakingly amassing some of the most convincing evidence about the power of directed intention to affect machinery. They are absolute sticklers for scientific method, no-nonsense and to the point. Robert Jahn is one of the few people I have ever met who speak in perfect, complete sentences. Brenda Dunne is equally perfectionist about detail in both experiment and language. I would be assured of no sloppy protocol in my experiments if Jahn and Dunne agreed to be involved.

The two of them also have a vast array of scientists at their disposal. They head the International Consciousness Research Laboratory, many of whose members are among the most prestigious scientists performing consciousness research in the world. Dunne also runs PEARTree, a group of young scientists interested in consciousness research.

Jahn and Dunne immediately warmed to the idea. We met on numerous occasions and kicked around some possibilities. Eventually, they put forward Fritz-Albert Popp, assistant director of the International Institute of Biophysics (IIB) in Neuss, Germany, to conduct the first intention experiments. I knew Fritz Popp through my research for The Field. He was the first to discover that all living things emit a tiny current of light. As a noted German physicist recognized internationally for his discoveries, Popp would also be a stickler for strict scientific method.

Other scientists, such as psychologist Gary Schwartz of the Biofield Center at the University of Arizona, Marilyn Schlitz, vice president for research and education at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Dean Radin, IONS' senior scientist, and psychologist Roger Nelson of the Global Consciousness Project, have also offered to participate.

I do not have any hidden sponsors of this project. The website and all our experiments will be funded by the pr...

Customer Reviews

Scientifc Evidence for the Power of Intention
"We can no longer view ourselves as isolated from our environment and our thoughts the private, self-contained workings of an individual brain. Dozens of scientists have produced thousands of papers in the scientific literature offering sound evidence that thoughts are capable of profoundly affecting all aspects of our lives. As observers and creators, we are constantly remaking our world at every instant. Every thought we have, every judgment we hold, however, unconscious, is having an effect. With every moment that it notices, the conscious mind is sending an intention." - From the book

What if eggs registered a cry of alarm, then resignation, when one of their number was dropped in boiling water? What if you could change the shape of your bicep muscle simply by sitting on a couch and using your brain? What if plants could learn to differentiate between true and artificial human intent--a plant "learning curve"--such as a researcher *thinking* about lighting a match under one of its leaves, but not intending to actually do it? What if directed thoughts produce demonstrable physical energy, even over a remote distance--perhaps altering the very molecular structure of the object of intention? Can praying for 4,000 patients with hospital-acquired infections affect their healing and recovery--when prayed for *4-10 years after their hospitalization*?

Do these questions sound like plots out of a sci-fi novel to you--or perhaps ridiculous notions from New Age space cadets? What if these concepts were actually the quantifiable results of rigorous scientific studies?

Like her previous book The Field, author Lynne McTaggart explores the edges of frontier science, boldly going where ingrained Newtonian paradigms have never gone before: the realm of pioneering consciousness experiments. In her newest book The Intention Experiment, McTaggart not only recounts dozens of extraordinary scientific studies on the power of human intention on machines, plants, animals and other humans, but also explains how to harness this power individually and collectively for specific results.

In fact, McTaggart, in conjunction with Dr. Gary Schwartz of Center for Frontier Medicine in Biofield Science at the University of Arizona, now endeavors to undertake the world's largest scientific mind-over-matter experiment in history, inviting readers to participate in online research on massive group intention. In addition, McTaggart encourages participants to use her blueprint of exercises and recommendations for "powering up"--based on the results of extensive research--to formulate their own personal goals, especially unlikely ones, and report the results to her website.

Some of the fascinating studies and research findings detailed in The Intention Experiment include:

* "...although the activity of the REGs was normal in the days leading up to 9/11, the machines became increasingly correlated a few hours *before* the first tower was hit, as though there had been a mass premonition... The world had felt a collective shudder several hours before the first plane crash, and every REG machine had heard and duly recorded it."

* "Volunteers between 20 and 35 years old imagined flexing one of their biceps as hard as they could during daily training sessions carried out five times a week. After ensuring that the participants were not doing any actual exercise, including tensing their muscles, the researches discovered an astonishing 13.5 percent increase in muscle size and strength after just a few weeks, an advantage that remained for three months after the mental training stopped."

* Clearly, during an altered state, roughly corresponding to the hyperalert state of intense meditation, conscious thoughts can convince the body to endure pain, cure many serious diseases, and change virtually any condition.

* Water treated by healers underwent a fundamental change in its molecular makeup.

* "...Helmut Schmidt successfully employed a similar study design to change his own prerecorded breathing rate, demonstrating that it is possible to retroactively change your own physical state as well...intention is capable of reaching back down the time line to influence past events, or emotional or physical responses, at the point when they originally occurred. Physicists no longer consider retrocausation inconsistent with the laws of the universe. More than one hundred articles in the scientific literature propose ways in which laws of physics can account for time displacement."

A recent article in Rolling Stone magazine mentioned that well-intentioned, heartfelt prayer might inadvertently harm or kill patients--an article that no doubt deflated the beliefs and hopes of some people...not to mention seeming to contradict the many studies showing the efficacy of prayer. With uncanny prescience, McTaggart addresses this study in depth, concluding, "When we are consciously attempting to affect someone else with our thoughts, we may want to search our hearts about our true feelings to ensure that we are not sending tainted love."

The Intention Experiment also explores why Reiki, energy healing and voodoo works, as well as the science behind visualization, entrainment between loving couples, psychic ability, retrocausation, biofeedback, remote viewing, and manifestation. If you're intrigued by the ideas presented in The Secret, What the Bleep Do We Know?!, Ramtha material, and the Abraham material (Law of Attraction)--but crave scientific proof and a more globally connected, compassionate paradigm--The Intention Experiment by Lynne McTaggart abundantly delivers. Proving what mystics, shamans, and spiritual teachers have demonstrated and shared for centuries--that all is connected in the web of life--I'm thrilled that there's *finally* a book that integrates volumes of hard scientific data with idea that thoughts are "things" that solidify, and influence, matter itself.

Instead of merely offering up an incredible amount of detailed research findings (the notes/citations and Bibliography are well over 30 pages)--which is a feat in itself--The Intention Experiment does what many books do not: translates the implications of these findings for everyday folks, and provides a simple model to follow for personal experimentation and manifestation. Bravo to Ms. McTaggart for this book, and for providing the opportunity for readers to participate in the largest, grandest experiment on group intention in human history. (http://www.theintentionexperiment.com/)

Janet Boyer, author of The Back in Time Tarot Book: Picture the Past, Experience the Cards, Understand the Present (coming Fall 2008 from Hampton Roads Publishing)

Reasons to act
The preface to "The Intention Experiment" is pivotal to understanding this book's purpose. In it, Lynne McTaggart explains that, in previously writing "The Field," she aimed to make sense of all the ideas from ongoing research into quantum physics and, ultimately the implications of the Zero Point Field for human life and consciousness. The response to "The Field" was more than gratifying, yet McTaggart felt that her own journey of discovery had just begun. The scientific evidence she had amassed suggested something remarkable about our potential to affect reality, but left her with many unanswered questions. Hence her current book, "The Intention Experiment."

McTaggart still does not claim to have all the answers. In fact, the earlier part of the book describes her renewed search for answers. Anyone who has read "The Field," is an experienced meditator, a healer, practiced in qigong and/or has had unexplained experiences themselves will need no further persuasion that intention is a real force: targeting your thoughts actually works. However, the early chapters are replete with ongoing research into consciousness and human intention that will challenge the hardest sceptic. Not light reading, with all the protocol details and statistics, but there are some staggering revelations. We are certainly far more than we think we are.

The author's description of the intention experiment she negotiated with eminent German scientist, Franz Albert Popp is highly significant (especially his courage in agreeing to it in the first place.) McTaggart admits beguilingly that she was deflated after they had discussed the likely target. "For our experiment, I had wanted to help heal burn victims, to save the world from global warming. Single celled organisms weren't exactly my idea of heroics and high drama." However, when she began to research algae, she quickly changed her mind. Algae could be critical to our survival. Why? Well, you'll need to read the book.

The "Intention Exercises" in the last three chapters include suggestions for personal as well as group work, and are mostly a summary of meditation, visualisation and affirmation techniques already known. However, the focus is more specific. (There is a caveat, given earlier in the book, to remember that there is a significant difference between intention and attention.)

The book ends with an invitation to join a global intention experiment. Whether you do this or not, is optional. However, this book is not made for mere armchair philosophy. It is an interactive book that challenges each of us to do something at one level or another. I would defy any reader to walk away from "The Intention Experiment" and not change a thing in their life, or the way in which they live it.

Dazzling Scientific & Interactive Evidence of the Power of Intentions
The long-running paradigm of good intentions paving the road to hell has been brilliantly overturned by investigative journalist Lynne McTaggart's new book, THE INTENTION EXPERIMENT. McTaggart provides dazzling evidence of the spectacular power of intentions from a wide variety of peer-reviewed, statistically significant research reports as she takes us on a tour of cutting-edge research currently underway in the relatively new field of consciousness. One of the challenges of studying the mind's effect on matter is that intention demonstrates variable effects depending on the state of the host and the time, place, and manner by which it is initiated, which McTaggart addresses by presenting a number of ways that various types of intentions produce different effects, as well as ways to help ensure better outcomes.

THE INTENTION EXPERIMENT takes us on a journey to discover what, exactly, is meant by 'intention,' and how we can produce results we'll most appreciate. Whereas seasoned meditators can demonstrate remarkable command over their physical processes and remotely influence others, McTaggart describes how anyone can learn to achieve noticeable results. The key to achieving an effective state of intentionality lies in powering up, reaching a state of peak intensity, developing mindfulness, merging with what is to be influenced, being compassionate, and specifically stating an intention. When we follow these instructions after reading a thorough overview of relevant research, we can find it a lot easier to believe that it may be possible for us to send our intentions to far-off places and times.

Some of the more startling facts in THE INTENTION EXPERIMENT are research findings about how our intentions can influence the past, and that athletes who do not physically exercise but only imagine their workouts can increase their muscle strength between 13 and 16 percent. The world's top athletes depend on mental rehearsal to help guarantee their competitive edge, and everyone can see tremendous improvements in our lives by rehearsing specific activities before actually doing them.

High points in THE INTENTION EXPERIMENT include a description of the way: atoms can become entangled and behave as one single giant atom, a heated fullerene molecule can exhibit wavelike behavior in which it interferes with itself, human bodies can act as transmitting and receiving antennas, living things demonstrate awareness of the well-being of other living things around them, biofields change when receiving and sending healing intentions, physical health improves when others send focused healing intentions, different forms of meditation produce strikingly different brain waves, brain waves can be manipulated to initiate transcendent and terrifying experiences, sun and geomagnetic activity influences telepathic and telekinetic abilities, and places and things can become harmoniously aligned with healing intent.

THE INTENTION EXPERIMENT becomes an interactive experience for readers interested in participating in an on-going series of philanthropic and scientific intentionality experiments at: [...]