by Lynne McTaggart

On March 10-11, the 400 attendees of the first Intention Experiment conference in central London experienced a little bit of magic. For the finale of the conference, we decided to involve them in a pilot Intention Experiment: the first-ever long-distance double-blinded group intention experiment in history.

Before that day, a great deal of behind-the-scenes preparation had gone on between me and noted psychologist and consciousness researcher Dr. Gary Schwartz and his team at the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health at the University of Arizona in Tucson. We wanted to replicate and expand the pilot experiment that I’d carried out with Dr. Fritz-Albert Popp at the International Institute for Biophysics, as detailed in chapter 12 of my latest book The Intention Experiment. In that experiment 16 experienced meditators and I had experimented with the power of distant group intention by sending healing intention to four targets at Popp’s lab in Neuss, Germany : two kinds of algae, a jade plant and a person. Biophoton measurements of all the targets showed we’d had a strong effect during the times we’d sent healing intention.

However, for these first experiments we didn’t have matched controls – that is, algae, a jade plant and a person NOT sent intention — only control periods when we were resting and not ‘running’ intention.

This time, we decided to have two near identical targets, randomly pick one of them to send intention to, and use the other as our control.

Eventually we decided on a simple geranium leaf, picked off a thriving geranium plant in Dr. Schwartz’s Arizona lab.

To be honest, I was a little crestfallen at the target. I wanted heroics and high drama. I wanted to save people from burning buildings. Why a leaf? And why biophoton emissions?

But as Dr Schwartz said to me, quoting the movie Contact: “Baby steps, Lynne, baby steps.” If we were going to prove the power of intention through scientific experiments, we had to take it one faltering step at a time.

Using a simple biological system like a leaf narrows down all the all the variables of a living thing, with its unfathomable number of chemical and energetic processes occurring at every instant. During our first intention experiment, Dr. Schwartz’s team would examine the alteration in the tiny light being emitted from the leaf, which was infinitely more subtle than cellular growth rate. Only by using such a simple system could we show that our effect was indisputably due to intention and not a dozen other possibilities.

Dr. Schwartz has a number of extremely sensitive state-of-the-art supercooled charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras in his laboratory. This exquisitely sensitive equipment, now used to photograph galaxies deep in space, picks up about 70 per cent of any light, no matter how faint. This type of ultrasensitive equipment would enable us to record every single hair’s breath of difference – even by a single photon – and so determine the extent of our influence.

This time we decided set up a control – an identical leaf that would not be sent intention. In the Popp study, the scientists in Germany did not know when we were sending intention. In this new study, we decided that the scientists at the University of Arizona would not know which leaf we were sending intention to.

Back in Arizona, several hours before our experiment, Mark Boccuzzi, one the scientific team, carried out the meticulous lab work required for this type of simple experiment. He carefully selected and prepared two leaves from the geranium plant with similar biophoton emission release. Then prepared them by making 16 holes / injuries in a 4 x 4 grid — the entire process can take two or more hours. Both leaves were placed under web cams and the images sent to Peter, the webmaster of our Intention Experiment website. Both pages were given to the audiovisual technician at the conference. Then Mark, Peter and the AV technician stood by.

Right before we began, Dr. Schwartz, who was on the phone, reminded the audience that they were making scientific history.

Then I randomly selected a member of our audience of 400 —who’d come from countries around the world — to flip a coin to determine which leaf would be displayed to the audience and sent intention to. Heads meant it was leaf 1; tails, leaf 2.

His coin came up heads. I instructed the AV technician to display leaf 1 on the screen in front of the audience. The leaf that was not displayed would act as the control.

A giant image of our leaf appeared on the screen. I then instructed the audience to ‘Power Up’, a program I published in The Intention Experiment created by extrapolating from those conditions that work best in studies of mind over matter or are used by intention ‘masters’ like healers. Then I asked them to think to themselves an intention for the leaf to ‘glow and glow’ — to produce increased biophoton light.

We chose ‘glowing’ because we were just looking for an effect – any effect — and we thought this would be easiest for an audience to imagine.

Their task was to keep up this intention for 10 minutes, while hypnotic meditative music — a lovely Reiki chant — played in the background.

The conference ended and everyone went back to their respective countries. All of us held our breath, waiting to hear what occurred at the other side of the world in a small lab in Arizona.

Several days later, I heard from Dr. Schwartz. The results were far more than I’d imagined.

As he summarizes: ‘After the ten minute intention period, the leaves were placed in the light-tight biophoton imaging system (his super-cooled digital CCD camera system) and photographed for one and one half hours. The results of the glowing intention were so strong that they could readily seen in the digital biophoton images; in addition, the increased biophoton effect was highly statistically significant.

‘For a first experiment of this kind,’ he continues, ‘the results could not be more encouraging, and they inspire us to continue this research.’

I cannot go into any more detail. The results are going to be published in a scientific journal, which does not allow us to publish data (such as photographs) anywhere else first. As soon as the results are published, we’ll be able to share those photographs with the world.

But in the meantime, we know we’ve made some extraordinary in-roads into demonstrating the power of intention scientifically. This may be one of the first examples of the collective thought of a group of people being heard round the world.

©2007 Lynne McTaggart

Lynne McTaggart is the author of The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World (Simon & Schuster). To participate in her global on-line intention experiments, visit www.theintentionexperiment.com.