have some exciting news. I have been in discussion with Deepak Chopra, the Alliance for New Humanity, and the Association for Global New Thought, an umbrella organization of New Thought churches, about having their members band together to run a giant Peace experiment in the autumn 2008 . The New Thought churches are planning their own consciousness initiatives, but as one giant supergroup with enormous publicity, we would have the largest experiment of all time.Of course an experiment of this magnitude may have many challenges, most of them technical — chiefly, how to create server power large enough to support thousands of people from all around the world joining forces on the same web page at the same time.
The biggest challenge with these experiences is not in demonstrating the power of intention (that seems to be the easy bit).
The difficulty is in finding an internet system sophisticated enough to allow thousands of people around the world to stare at the same image on a single web page at the same time. Allowing in such sizeable simultaneous traffic requires a vast amount of extra web capacity. The ability of a website to handle simultaneous web traffic is completely reliant upon the size of a web system’s server power.
As many of you remember, we learned this the hard way with our very first Intention Experiment, when the website crashed after an estimated 10,000 people attempted to participate in the experiment.
Three web teams so far
We have had three teams handling these experiments. Our second team attempted to avert a homepage overload by holding the experiments on a special page, away from the main website. That web team also 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.
We also rented server space from a company that supplies the servers for Pop Idol, the British equivalent of American Idol, and was well versed in preventing a massive cyber traffic jam. Nearly 7000 people from thirty countries participated in the experiment, and only a handful had problems logging on. Nine linked servers were on hand to distribute the load. For the first few moments of our experiment, they were almost full.
Unique use of a social network
The technology of the second experiment had worked, but afterward we’d been presented with an extraordinarily large bill. The server power alone had cost us $6,000 for a half hour and the special web pages many thousands more – far too much for me to donate on a regular basis.
So we turned to a third web designer, Nick Haenen, who came up with an ingenious solution to our need for vast server power. Instead of renting our own servers, Nick said, why not make use of the giant capacity already created by a social network portal, like MySpace or Facebook? He’d constructed some sites using the Ning social network portal. Ning offers individual organizations instant facilities for a community based website.
The main advantage of Ning, for our purposes, was its server capacity — some 500 linked servers — to cope with the organization’s 20,000 social networks.
When Nick contacted the Ning creators they were enthusiastic about using their equipment to run intention experiments (Ning, by the way means ‘love’ in Chinese), and began working with Nick to modify the system slightly to cope with our special needs. By the time they were through, they said, our system would be able to cope with a hundred thousand simultaneous users.
However, we will still have the problem of having thousands of people registering all at once and participants that exceed even Ning’s enormous capacity.
So we will be meeting with some technical people from the Alliance for New Humanity to resolve some of these unique issues presented by attempting to run such a unique and uniquely large experiment. Watch this space for new developments.
Many people ask me about what it feels like to ‘move aside’, as I mention in Powering Up. How do I drop the ego and connect with The Field?
I can answer that best by examining transcendent experiences — those moments when people have experienced cosmic consciousness — a loss of the self and feeling a sense of oneness with the universe.
All of us at one point or another in our lives have experienced The Field: a sense of unity with all things and with the life force—during a dream or some altered state of consciousness, at a moment in childhood, or even while intensely in love.
It could be a moment of precognition, when we intuitively sense something or see into the future. It could be a dream about our divine purpose in life or perhaps during a profound moment of meditation or self-hypnosis.
However individual the moment, there are several aspects that distinguish it as cosmic awareness. In that moment, you move away from the tightly boundaried ‘self’ of your own ego and embrace a more oceanic feeling of your self in unity with the entire universe, with a sense of interconnectedness with all things. There is also an inner knowing that things will never be the same again.
It is invariably a profoundly transforming experience, usually lasting the rest of your life, having opened a window into a reality you never knew existed.
Moonwalking
It may be the experience that forces you to make an abrupt change in your life, as it did with Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell. Returning from the moon and while staring at the earth from space, Mitchell experienced a transcendent moment. He had a profound feeling of connectedness, as if all the planets and all the people of all time were attached to him by an invisible web. Mitchell’s epiphany changed his life forever. It shattered his world view and became the catalyst for his life’s work thereafter: the study of consciousness.
Arguably the world’s authority on cosmic consciousness and the altered states of consciousness is American parapsychologist and author Dr Charles Tart, who has been investigating altered states of consciousness for more than 40 years.
Tart uses the term ‘cosmic consciousness’, coined by physician Robert Maurice Bucke in 1961, and also his definition:
“The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is, as the name implies, a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe.”
Common aspects of cosmic consciousness
Tart concluded that all cosmic-consciousness experiences tend to have some similarities:
There is often a sense of ‘God’, but more as the ‘Absolute’ than the anthropomorphic god of organized religion.
Our brain becomes more coherent during such experiences. At a meeting of the Society of Psychophysiological Research, the EEGs of meditators during a transcendent experience were far more coherent than that of a control group. They also displayed more efficient performance on complex cognitive activities.
When carrying out intention, many people believe that you must ‘see’ the exact object of your desire clearly in your mind’s eye. But for an intention it isn’t necessary to have a sharp internal image or, indeed, any image at all. It is enough to just think about an intention, without a mental picture, and simply to create an impression, a feeling or a thought.
Some of us think in images, others through words, still others through sounds, touch or the spatial relationship between objects. Your mental rehearsal will depend on which senses are most developed in your brain.
Nevertheless, you can sharpen up your intention and ability to visualize a result by getting into a meditative state and imagining the following, while recalling or imagining as much as you can about the sight and smells, and your feelings about them:
In honor of Valentine’s Day tomorrow, I’d like everyone to have fun with me by carrying out a special personal Intention Experiment.
As you know, I always refer to personal manifestation as an ‘experiment’. When trying out your own personal Intention Experiments, I always recommend that you select a goal that has never happened to you but that you would like to have happen. If you choose something that seldom occurs or is particularly unlikely, if it does come to pass it is more likely to be the result of your intention.
For many women, the something that never or almost never happens in their lives is receiving flowers from their partner – even on Valentine’s Day.
So today is a great day for us to share a personal experiment. If your partner never sends you flowers, why not set an intention for him to do so?
And as it's a Leap Year, all you men out there – send an intention to receive flowers (or chocolates) from your partners, too.
At some time convenient time today, Power Up and then send the following intention for 10 minutes. If you can do it at 5 pm GMT, with us, so much the better. Here’s the intention and other time zones around the world:
My intention is for my partner to buy me flowers for Valentine’s Day.
Or. . .
My intention is for my partner to buy me chocolates for Valentine’s Day.
Other Time Zones
12 noon US/Eastern
11 am US/Central
10 am Canada/Mountain
9 am US/Pacific
7 am US/Hawaii
6 pm Western Europe
4 am Saturday Australia/Sydney
Please write in with your results here.
If you always receive flowers or chocolates, set another intention — again, something that never happens. Here are a few suggestions:
Remember, you should choose one single event to change — something where change can be easily quantified and can probably be attributed to your thoughts.
Share your experiences with us tomorrow by writing in here.
Does this kind of intention work?
We know for certain is that intention has generated success under controlled experimental laboratory conditions, and that they are widely used by athletes and also the peoples of native cultures, who are able to effect extraordinary change in their lives.
What you and I are learning together is how far we can take them in our lives. Your efforts today, in effect, are part of our ongoing experiments.
But two readers wrote in about how their flower intentions were extraordinarily successful.
Jean (not her real name) who lives in England, wrote to say that her husband never gives her flowers anymore. One day they were standing in line at a garden center and as she took in all the beautiful plants surrounding her, she remembered my suggestion.
Right then and there, she sent a silent intention for her husband to bring her flowers. Suddenly he left the line and tore off somewhere. When he returned, he was carrying an enormous blooming geranium plant. ‘I just had this sudden urge to buy you this,’ he said sheepishly. ‘It was like a voice in my head telling me to do this.’
An American I’ll call Sandra complained to me in one of my weekend workshops that her partner, loving though he was in every other way, never gave her flowers. So I suggested that she set an intention for this to happen.
She emailed me later: “You won’t believe it. As soon as I got home, he opened the door with a bouquet of red roses in his hand.’
Don’t forget: write in and tell us what happened with your intention today.
Scout out where activity is to take place. Take photos, make notes and store as many mental impressions as you can. Note specific visual impressions and images, and any taste sensations you have, and record every smell and sound. In particular, note what things feel like. Is it cold or blustery there, or hot and sultry? Feel as many aspects of the place as you can.
Get into a state of peak intensity. First do your relaxation and meditation exercises, then begin focusing clearly on the present with all your five senses.
Develop a picture of yourself engaged in the activity you are rehearsing. Remember: your mental picture should not be like watching a video of yourself, but be an image of what it feels like to be carrying out the activity.
Run through your five senses. Examine your visual senses and what you are doing in vivid colour and detail. Recall the place you’ve already visited and insert yourself there, engaged in the activity. Imagine what the activity feels like.
Pay particular attention to your kinesthetic sensibility. What’s in your hands? What are they doing? Are you standing or sitting? How does that feel?
Carry out the activity in real time in your head. As you do so, pay attention to your feelings, your thoughts and your five senses.
Be specific. Don’t imagine only fragments—run through the entire activity, moment by moment. Keep your senses keenly trained on what every minute feels like.
Practice getting out of trouble or any sort of setback. If you’re imagining giving a presentation at work, imagine the computer not working. If you’re playing a winning game of tennis, imagine your opponent getting the edge on you. If you’re trying to manifest a dream such as getting the ideal job, buying a dream house or having a child, imagine encountering difficulty. Then mentally run through how you’re going to deal with it.
Set yourself a regular time for your run-through. Keep mentally rehearsing, day after day, until you need to perform.
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