The Intention Experiment: Use Your Thoughts to Change the World. Lynne McTaggart

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СКАЧАТЬ have orbital resonances. Our sense of hearing operates through a form of entrainment: different parts of a membrane of the inner ear resonate to different frequencies of sound. Resonance even occurs in the seas, such as in the tidal resonance of the Bay of Fundy in the northeast end of the Gulf of Maine, near Nova Scotia.

      Once they march to the same rhythm, things that are entrained send out a stronger signal than they do individually. This most commonly occurs with musical instruments, which sound amplified when all playing in phase. At the Bay of Fundy, the time required for a single wave to travel from the bay’s mouth to its opposite end and back is exactly matched by the time of each tide. Each wave is amplified by the rhythm of each tide, resulting in some of the highest tides in the world.

      Entrainment also occurs when someone sends a strong intention to cause harm, which became evident in the tohate experiments of Mikio Yamamoto of the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba and the Nippon Medical School in Tokyo. Tohate is a kind of mental stand-off between two Qigong practitioners, one of whom receives a sensory shock and is eventually made to submit and move back several yards without any physical contact from the other. The central question posed by the technique, in Yamamoto’s mind, was whether the effect of tohate is psychological or physical: does the opponent move back because of psychological intimidation, or is he knocked over by the qi of his opponent?

      In the first of Yamamoto’s studies, a Qigong master was isolated in an electromagnetically shielded room on the fourth floor of a building, while his student was similarly isolated on the first floor. Yamamoto signalled for the master to perform ‘qi emission’ over 80 seconds at random intervals. Each time, he tracked their separate movements – the sending of the qi and the start of the pupil’s recoil. In nearly a third of the 49 such trials – a highly significant result – whenever the master engaged in tohate movements, his opponent in the other room was physically knocked back. In a second set of 57 trials, Yamamoto wired both teacher and pupil to EEG machines. Whenever the master emitted qi, his pupil showed an increase in the number of alpha brain waves in his right frontal lobe, suggesting that this was where the body initially receives the intention ‘message’.

      Yamamoto’s final set of trials examined the EEG-recorded brain waves of both master and student. Whenever the master performed tohate, the beta brain waves of both men demonstrated a greater sense of coherence.19 In an earlier study carried out by the Tokyo group, the brain waves of the receiver and sender became synchronized within one second during tohate.20

      Besides resonance, the DMILS studies offered evidence of another phenomenon during intention: the receiver anticipated the information by registering the ‘ouch’ a few moments before the pinch occurred in the sender. In 1997, in his former laboratory at the University of Nevada, Radin discovered that humans may receive a physical foreboding of an event. He set up a computer that would randomly select photos designed to calm, to arouse, or to upset a participant. His volunteers were wired to physiological monitors that recorded changes in skin conduction, heart rate and blood pressure, and they sat in front of a computer that would randomly display colour photos of tranquil scenes (landscapes), or scenes designed to shock (autopsies) or to arouse (erotic materials).

      Radin discovered that his subjects were registering physiological responses before they saw the photo. As if trying to brace themselves, their responses were highest before they saw an image that was erotic or disturbing. This offered the first laboratory proof that our bodies unconsciously anticipate and act out our own future emotional states and that the nervous system does not merely cushion itself against a future blow, but also works out the emotional meaning of it.21

      Dr Rollin McCraty, executive vice-president and director of research for the Institute of HeartMath, in Boulder Creek, California was fascinated by the idea of shared physical foreboding of an event, but wondered where exactly in the body this intuitive information might first be felt. He used the original design of Radin’s study with a computerized system of randomly generated arousing photos, but hooked up his participants to a greater complement of medical equipment.

      McCraty discovered that these forebodings of good and bad news were felt in both the heart and brain, whose electromagnetic waves would speed up or slow down just before a disturbing or tranquil picture was shown. Furthermore, all four lobes of the cerebral cortex appeared to take part in this intuitive awareness. Most astonishing of all, the heart appeared to receive this information moments before the brain did. This suggested that the body has certain perceptual apparatus that enables it continually to scan and intuit the future, but that the heart may hold the largest antenna. After the heart receives the information, it communicates this information to the brain.

      McCraty’s study had shown certain fascinating differences between the sexes. Both the heart and brain became entrained with each other earlier and more frequently in women than they did in men. McCraty concluded that this offered scientific evidence of the universal assumption that women are naturally more intuitive than men and more in touch with their heart centre.22

      McCraty’s conclusion – that the heart is the largest ‘brain’ of the body – has now gained credibility after research findings by Dr John Andrew Armour at the University of Montreal and the Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur in Montreal. Armour discovered neurotransmitters in the heart that signal and influence aspects of higher thought in the brain.23 McCraty discovered that touch and even mentally focusing on the heart cause brain-wave entrainment between people. When two people touched while focusing loving thoughts on their hearts, the more ‘coherent’ heart rhythms of the two began to entrain the brain of the other.24

      Armed with this new evidence about the heart, Dean Radin and Marilyn Schlitz decided to explore whether remote mental influence extended to anywhere else in the body. An obvious place to explore was the gut. People speak about intuition as a ‘gut instinct’ or ‘gut feeling’. Certain researchers have even referred to the gut as a ‘second brain’.25 Radin wondered if a gut instinct was accompanied by an actual physical effect.

      Radin and Schlitz gathered 26 student volunteers, paired them, and this time wired them up to an electrogastrogram (EGG), which measures the electrical behaviour of the gut; monitors on the skin usually closely match the frequencies and contractions of the stomach. Although the Freiburg study had shown otherwise, Radin and Schlitz believed that familiarity could only help to magnify the effects of remote influence. In case some sort of physical connection was indeed important, Radin asked all the participants to exchange some meaningful object first.

      Radin put one participant from a pair in one room. The other sat in another, darkened room, attached to an electrogastrogram, viewing live video images of the first person. Images periodically flashed on another monitor, accompanied by music designed to arouse particular emotions: positive, negative, angry, calming or just neutral.

      The results revealed another example of entrainment – this time in the gut. The EGG readings of the receiver were significantly higher and correlated with those of the sender when the sender experienced strong emotions, positive or negative. Here was yet more evidence that the emotional state of others is registered in the body of the receiver – in this case, deep in the intestines – and that the home of the gut instinct is indeed the gut itself.26

      This latest evidence was further proof that our emotional responses are constantly being picked up and echoed in those closest to us.27 In every one of these studies, СКАЧАТЬ