Welcome, thank you for joining us today. You're listening to the Beyond 50 radio program. I'm your host, Daniel Davis. We have an interesting guest joining us here on the program today who is starting with what is simply known as the Intention Experiment, which in fact is also the title of her new book, The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and Your World. She's also best-selling author of the book Living the Field. And I'll tell you, it's going to be really interesting, so you want to tune into this because this is something that I remember even as a kid. You know, I'd think something and somehow, outside materially, it would just kind of happen. And I've always kind of wondered about that. Was it just mere serendipity or coincidence that it was just something on a consistent level, or was I actually tapping into something as a child that was a lot more powerful than I could ever imagine? What we're going to find out about this is our guest joining us today is Lynn McTaggart, and she's going to talk with

us about the intention experiment using your thoughts to change your life and the world around you. Thank you for joining us here on the Beyond 50 radio program today. Hi, it's nice to be with you. Now tell us about your body of work and how you got involved in, and the science, I guess, of spirituality as well as intention. My goodness, I got involved with this because I write a news monthly newsletter called What Doctors Don't Tell You. And in the course of doing that, I kept finding medical studies, very good scientific studies of spiritual healing. And I kept thinking to myself, if this is true, if somebody can send a thought to someone else and make that person better, then our understanding of the world and how it works is utterly incomplete. So this was in the, excuse me, in the mid-90s. And I convinced my publisher to let me go on a journey without a compass. I really didn't know what I was looking for or what I was going to find. But what I did find after a while was a

bunch of scientists who were all working on frontier work that collectively added up to a new science. A new view of the world. So, I was just astonished by this, and I wrote this up in a book called The Field. But then, um, I was struck by all of the evidence suggesting that thoughts are an actual physical energy with the capacity to change physical matter. And so, I was just curious about how much, you know, what can you do with intention? Everybody uses the word intention. What does it mean? And, you know, and what can we really do with this? You know, can I use my thoughts to help my kids pass their math test or fly up on the top of my roof and fix my radio, you know, my aerial? Or more importantly, can my one little puny thought do anything to save the catalogue of suffering on the planet? And so, I was looking for, particularly, I was looking for a lot any evidence that group intention actually magnifies the effect. But the evidence that was out there was

interesting and tantalizing, but not conclusive. Yeah, my husband came to me one day and said, Why don't you do these experiments yourself? At first, that sounded ridiculous because I'm not a scientist, I'm just a science writer. But then I started thinking about it, and I thought, Well, I know lots of scientists from the field, and I have many, many readers all over the world. So if I put that together and I just use the web as a medium, I'll have the largest global laboratory in the world. And so that's what we've done. Well, it's interesting because you've seen a lot of this happen, especially today. There have been films out there, such as What the Bleep Do We Know, and you have certain books out there about how we can start taking control of our destiny by working within the quantum field, if you will. So how come it seems that we're really on a horizon where this is all coming together what seems so quickly? Um, you mean that people, so many people

are interested in all of this. I think that there's just a general global consciousness and awareness, and that's been quickened by so many of the environmental crises that we're faced right now, as well as the many crises that we have in the world. I think that given just this time and place has created a very different consciousness. It's a bit like the 60s, but with much more urgency, and I think many of those people are also understand, you know, just feeling like this is the time really to act. But there is a huge, huge global shift because I travel all over the world, and I see it everywhere of people understanding the power of consciousness to change things, and also understanding that our old scientific story is no longer valid. Well, that makes a lot of sense. I know, uh, it was a good few years ago I was interviewing with a young Brazilian who wrote a book, uh, Faster than the Speed of Light, and he was kind of dubbed as the next person who was going to extend beyond.

Einstein's theories go a little deeper. What was quite interesting about his book was as you take a look at academia, especially in our universities, most people want to stay at the status quo for fear of risking their accolades or their particular academic position. So, they play it safe and nobody ever breaks the glass ceiling, so to speak. But you can see now in this day and age that we tend to be in a situation where that's become more and more of a necessity because as you just suggested, the old paradigms just don't work anymore. So, let's talk about what intention is and what some of the experiments that you've conducted in the field of intention, what those have been and what kind of results that you've seen. Well, they've been really exciting. What we've done was we, you know, we started with the University of Arizona and when we first talked about doing this, I had in mind big targets, you know, saving cancer or saving people from

cancer, things like that. But when we started, Dr. Schwartz said to me, Dr. Gary Schwartz from the University of Arizona, who very generously stepped forward to do this. And he said, No, let's start with Elise. And that sounded ridiculous to me because I have to invite people all over the world, and I didn't think I was going to ignite the global consciousness with a leaf and trying to change the little light emissions that come out of a leaf. But as Dr. Schwartz said, Look, we're starting small. You know, we're doing something that never has been done before. And so we have to take baby steps here. So our first experiments had to do with just seeing if we could change the light emissions of these leaves. And we had, as all scientific experiments do, we need not one leaf, but two, because one to act as a control. So I did it in front of an audience of mine at a conference of mine in London. And we showed through this experiment, and the scientists were blinded to which

one we sent intention to that we truly made the leaf. The target leaf glow according to some very sensitive ccd cameras. So it wasn't like the leaf was glowing in actuality. But the little light emissions that come out of all living things were really increased according to our instructions. So we were heartened by this. And then we ran it over the internet. We had thousands of people from all over the globe participating um. And we again showed we could change the light in seeds. Then we began uh then we began with uh deciding well let's see if we can make seeds grow faster with our thoughts. So I was appearing in places all over the world. And whenever I would be somewhere. I would run this experiment. And with this experiment we had four sets of seeds. So we had three controls scientists once again didn't know what which one we were choosing. And in this situation I ran it the first one in Sydney Australia with the audience of 600. And we chose one of the four sets of seeds. We just had photographs of them that I

would show people, and we would choose one of them, and we'd send intention to it. The scientists wouldn't know which one we'd send attention to, but as soon as I called them and said it's over, they would plant all four sets of seeds and then measure them five days later. And with that experiment, with the Sydney experiment, and remember we're thousands of miles away from those seeds in Tucson, Arizona, we had a significant effect. The seed sent intention grew higher than the controls, and we ran that six times over the internet with thousands of people in Rhinebeck, New York, with a small group in Hilton Head, South Carolina, with a giant number of healers, experienced healers in Dallas or in Austin, and in Los Angeles. And in each instance, we had a significant effect. So we were very heartened by this because we had very robust data under very controlled conditions that you know you can send an intention from very far away to a little set of

seeds and make them grow faster and higher with your thoughts. The only thing the best result we had was from our healers in South Carolina. They grew. In that case, the plant grew about twice as fast. And so, it suggested to me that although everybody is innately a good intender, experience counts. And that was one reason in the book I included a whole program called Powering Up that I distilled from talking to many intention masters. And all of them had particular methods that had some distinction, but mostly they had a lot of commonalities. And so, I distilled down all of their various um techniques into a common program that people could follow. So now we've worked with. Now we're working with water and um we're moving on to a very big study. We're going to start in the autumn. We're going to try to do a peace intention experiment where we um where we're sending intention to a series of hot spots around the world to see if we can lower lower the violence with our thoughts. Ah, now what has been one of your main

goals as you've uh pursued this particular line of science to help people do when you originally got started um i guess my goal has been to empower people to demonstrate to people that you know they are they are not this kind of they don't necessarily end with their own body um that they have this power and collectively a larger power to heal each other and the world and you know i started out just thinking about it as an experiment that would slowly and methodically show people exactly what we can do but i also have looked at it as something where people can do it with each other and we have started doing that in our workshops we're running workshops around america this year and also in um in on our website we've invited people to to create small groups on our website and we found some astonishing things um this started with a vietnam vet who contacted me called don barry who said i have ankylosing spondylitis i can't move my spine and so i said okay well let's let's let

the readers out there on my website send intention to this guy so they started doing this twice a week, and he wrote me and I said keep a diary, and he wrote me three months later and said my spine is much better and I'm but my pain is is is a lot less, and then three months after that he wrote to me and said my pain is completely gone, and I actually moved to my doctor almost you know my doctor almost fainted, and that story keeps getting repeated all over and over and over again um, and I think you know we've had when a guy was in a really bad gas act a gas accident accident, and he burned his hands, and he had been part of a little discussion group on our website, so his wife wrote to them and said start sending intention to him now the guy was supposed to have skin grafts and be in the hospital for months, he got out of the hospital within a week, and his doctor said he was a healing miracle, and so I am witness to this kind of miracle

going on all the time. Particularly, we do this in our workshops too. We have people formulate into groups and send intention back and forth. And the next day, we do this with people with health challenges. And the next day, people are, you know, we are reporting that if they've had migraine for 15 years, they don't have a headache that morning and on and on. And there's all kinds of indications from just about everybody. You know, we oftentimes sit there for two hours listening to people's um healing stories from the day before. And so I'm finding that this power of the small group and connection is something really really powerful and even more powerful than individual intention. Well, it's interesting that you said also earlier that it also depends on experience. So a person coming in and trying this for the first time as they may have read your book and said, well, this all sounds pretty groovy here so let's take a shot at this. And so they try a time or two and they find well it's just not working effectively.

but you talk about experience. Now, how does one begin to harness this power of intention? Are there particular exercises that they need to do, or what is the process here? Yes, well, what's happened is, as I say, I distilled all of those ideas of different healers. I interviewed many qigong masters, master healers, Buddhist monks, and distilled all of their ideas into a very simple program, and their techniques into a simple program everyone can follow. It's in the intention experiment, and we teach it in an intense way on at our workshops. And it involves a very focused mind state, focused, and involves with all of your five senses, a very focused heart state, and a and a number of other conditions. It seems to work better when there is a uh that you ch. It seems to work better in a particular place. There have been a number of studies showing that intention works best and can and works faster and better if you carry it out in the same laboratory. That's in laboratory studies, so I infer.

from that, that it's important to choose your intention space, and to use it again and again, and that may help your intentions. And there's a number of other conditions, but primarily it is a highly focused heart state and mind state. And as I say, that's the sort of thing that we teach. I know this day and age too, you see, as I've discovered, uh, watching, as I mentioned earlier, movies like What the Bleep or you have books out there like The Secret or The Moses Code, whatever the case may be. And to me, it seems, in an interesting way, that they're sort of, here's how all this works, especially they start slinging around quantum physics and making it seem oversimplified. But I can hear from what you're saying, now it takes a little bit of work, you need to exercise to attune these things, but it's interesting, the response that people have to these particular kinds of books or these movies, where the whole idea is, I can just sit and intend all day without any action.

responsibility, and I can just manifest this stuff. So I'm going to go about my day and worry about something else. And what would you have to say to people like that? Because you know, obviously, you've got this program that, as you said, you kind of try to simplify it as best you can, but obviously there's some work to be done. Well, what I would say to people like that is that that has been the understanding people had, and even the people in the secret said that, you know, that it was like learning, you know, it was like uh being in kindergarten consciousness, kindergarten. They, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot more complications to it than what them was portrayed. Obviously, a movie has to simplify things a lot. And I'm not knocking the movie because I thought it was wonderful in introducing so many people to these concepts. I think what's demonstrated by um, by the information I've got from all of these intention masters is that anyone can do intention, but it does take practice and it does take technique. So I

would say that just sitting in your armchair and just thinking, I want this, um, is not going to work. You have to get into a certain state, and you also have to follow through. Even Napoleon Hill, one of the granddaddies of the idea of thinking, he had a book Think and Grow Rich, talked about action after having the thought and the focus. Then there's action. There's also a thing that nobody talks about, which is giving back. I mean, he talked about it, and it seems to be very, very much a part of this universal energy. You give, you don't just take. And, you know, giving back to the world is really important. And then I think there's other aspects of it. As I say, there's a right time, there's a right place, there's, um, there's certain aspects of planetary energies that are effective, you know, that enhance intention that I talk about in my book. So I think it's more than just having a thought. The other important aspect of all of this is the fact that people

think of intention as the power thought. You know, it's the one thought you've got. And then you know and um the big ask. You know, you get out there and you get down on your knees because you really want to have something. And you say, I want this. And you think that that's the only thing that the universe hears. But actually you are sending intention at every moment. You're sending a stream of things out. We now know from the evidence, scientific evidence, that we are beaming out quantum information all the time in the form of tiny particles of light. And if we're sending out that information, we're sending and receiving it every moment. Then um we are leaky buckets in a sense. We are sending out information at every all the time. And so it depe. You know, I think that one of the other important aspects here is to try to corral what it is that you're sending out all the time because most of us have one big positive thought and say that's our intention and a stream of negativity for the rest.

of the day, and all of that. Actually, all of your own mendacious thinking, secret judgments, and just general negativity, it becomes, in a sense, your intention after a while. I know it's interesting you say that, Lynn is, uh, that many times we've brought on our program, uh, people you would kind of consider money experts, but mostly in the realm of your feelings, your beliefs, and thinkings around whether it be being wealthy or just trying to attract more of that sort of abundance into your life. And one particular guest had said something, and it struck me because it wasn't too long after that I started really thinking on the matter, is that it really is that easy, but the question is, how do you tap into it? One of the ideas or realities is, for instance, how our minds work is apparently, I believe that our consciousness works at taking in or receiving 40 bits of information per second. However, our subconscious, it's more like 4 million bits of information per second. And she was talking on our program about how, you know, trying to do affirmations or

focus think about what it is that she wanted when it came to money. That her daughter had come into the room and said that, uh, she needed a new dress for a school play or some situation like that. And just sort of all at once mom kind of blew up and said, you know, where do you think I'm going to get this money from? And the daughter said, well, if you hate money that much, then you might as well thank her attention on something else because it's never going to come to you. And she thought that was very profound. So as you're talking about, even though you might consciously be intending something, maybe at a subconscious level, it's saying, no, that's really not what you want because I've been doing this other kind of intention. I've been attracting the real things that you really want. And it sounds to me like you're kind of affirming the same thing. Absolutely. I mean, we oftentimes say, I want to be rich, but we don't really want to be rich with

all of the responsibility that requires to take care of all the things that you have. What they mean is, I want to be free of um worry about money. I want to have enough for so I'm not worrying all the time. Or I want more freedom and more time to spend with my kids. And I think money will buy that. Or I want to travel a lot. And I think money will buy that. Or I want to do what I really want to do in my life. And I think that if I have a lot of money, I won't have to just work at this boring job. So it's not really that they want to be rich. They just don't want to be doing what they're doing. And they want to or possibly be doing something else. And so it's very important to be very specific. That's another part of my powering up program. Well, you can see the cyclical uh process too is what they don't want they attract more of anyway. That is the problem isn't it because you know deep inside as it's

been suggested, and again, we've had some really interesting experts in this area. Because the whole idea is, even though you're beyond 50, or you're reaching, or you're at the middle age where you think time is running out on you, where time becomes of the essence, do I have time to change the person I am into the person that I hope to be? And we resoundly get people that say consistently, yes, but what are you willing to do to do that? And the first thing is paying attention to what your intention is. And it's obvious through many experiments, Len, that you've conducted that scientifically, this is truly well affirmed. This isn't just some sort of, you know, snake oil that's on a wagon being carted around the wild, wild west, for instance. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely, absolutely. So yes, it's very interesting. And as I say, I'd like to just invite all of your listeners to be part of our peace intention experiment. We have this big experiment coming up with September.

14th is our pilot study, and we'll be working with people all around the world. We'll be choosing a particular hot spot with a high level of violence, and we'll be all sending intention to lower violence. I have a whole team of scientists this time who are going to be working on this from institutions from University of California, University of Arizona, two science scientists, from three scientists from Princeton University. A wonderful big team, and we'll be examining whether or not we can lower violence with our thoughts. I'd also love to invite your readers to be part of our workshops. We're running. We have one in Portland on August 8th through 10th, and we have another one in Cape Cod, Boston Cape Cod on the 31st of October to November 2nd. And in those, they're intensive. Then I really teach people how to become master intenders. Oh, very good. Now I know that you have to get running. So if you have a website people can go to

you also, yeah, just put out a monthly newsletter. Feel free to shoot that out to people, sure, please. If they want to be part of the intention experiment, please come to www.theintentionexperiment.com. And if they'd like to find out more about our workshops or sign up for them, it's www. Very good. Well, Lynne McTaggart, it's been a real pleasure to have you on the program. But again, the book is The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World. And I'll tell you one of the most profound phrases that I heard, I believe it was within about a year ago, was simply, You become what you think. And as you've seen from a scientific point of view, does that really ring true? Absolutely. You are what you think. And so is your world. Exactly. Well, that's great. And it sounds to me like hopefully, if we can intend strong enough, and you see the underlying side that the world peace or the possibility of at least world peace happening even.

within this generation can be a real possibility, and certainly everybody has to participate in that as well so they can find out more about that. Go ahead and give your website again one more time, okay? It's www.theintentionexperiment.com and www.theintentionworkshops.com. Well, Lynn McTaggart, thank you for joining us here on the Beyond 50 radio program today. It's been a pleasure, it's been a delight, thanks so much. Okay, folks, it's up to you. All you have to do is get out there and participate, and also realize that it is a responsibility to be able to take and get your intention to work in a very clear way. But most importantly, as Lynn had suggested earlier in the program, it's not about getting for you, but it's about creating that wonderful vacuum to where you're giving of service to others, and you'll find that things will just unfold to you in a wonderful way, and you'll have more abundance than you can ever imagine in a very.

very positive way. One of those ways you can do that is by tuning into our show, as well, and also visit us at our website at beyond50radio.com. That is the number 50 with a 5-0 and sign up for our free weekly e-newsletter where you'll find out more about wonderful people such as Lynn McTaggart, many of the other wonderful guests that we've had here on our program because it's really certainly up to you and it's never too late. I'm Daniel Davis. Thank you for joining us today and remember live your day past halfway.

Lynne McTaggart: The Intention Experiment

Lynne McTaggart: The Intention Experiment