An unintentional intention

Last week I was speaking with psychologist Dr. Gary Schwartz of the University of Arizona, my partner in many of these Intention Experiments, and who disclosed an interesting anomaly in our latest Germination Intention Experiment run in Austin on March 1, which has enormous implications for the infectious nature of our presence.
To understand what happened, it’s important for me to explain fully how these experiments are run.
Each time we have run our experiment, Dr. Schwartz’s lab technician Mark Boccozzi prepares four batches containing 30 seeds each. We randomly select one set of seeds as our target to send intention to (and the U of A scientists aren’t told which set we’ve chosen). After we send intention for ten minutes, then notify the scientists that we’ve finished.
At that point the scientists plant all four sets of sets of seeds under controlled conditions (that is, each batch is isolated from the others and planted in separate soil). At the end of five days, Mark then measures the plants.
In our latest study, as in all our others, the seeds sent intention grew higher than the three sets of controls.
Let’s call this kind of procedure the ‘intention’ studies.
But then, to provide another check on our results and so to ensure that they aren’t just a lucky accident, our U of A team runs a ‘non-intention’ Intention Experiment. In this experiment, they plant four sets of 30 seeds. But this time, no one sends intention to them, and after an appropriate interval, Mark plants them. So we’ll call these the ‘non-intention’ studies.
In every instance, the seeds sent intention from the ‘intention’ studies have grown higher than all four sets of seeds from the ‘non-intention’ studies – except, that is, for the non-intention study run after our Austin event.
In this instance, all four sets of seeds from the ‘non-intention’ study grew higher than every batch of seeds in the Austin intention study.
This was the only study where the non-intention seeds grew higher than seeds sent intention.
Dr. Schwartz puzzled over this and asked Mark about the conditions in which these seeds had been planted. Was anything unusual going on in the lab at the time?
Energetic contamination
Mark then explained that he’d run the non-intention intention study during a week when the lab had been undergoing construction. Parts of the lab were being taken apart over the entire five days, and people were constantly in and out – as was Mark. In every other control experiment, the seeds had been left more or less quietly on their own.
In Dr. Schwartz’s long experience with energy experiments, he told me, this kind of contaminated environment, filled with energetic ‘noise’, can easily affect results. So he hypothesizes (and remember – this is only a hypothesis until it is tested), this final control study was energetically ‘contaminated’, so to speak.
If this is true, it opens up a number of intriguing possibilities. It suggests that simply by being present, the energy of the experimenter can skew results.
It also suggests something far more fundamental – that the very essence of being is a relationship. A change in the environment of any kind – the presence of people, a rainy day, somebody’s bad mood — all may have an effect on the growth of plants and indeed on every other living thing in that space.
Our natural state of being is a relationship – a tango – a constant state of one affecting the other. Just as the subatomic particles that compose us cannot be separated from the space and particles surrounding them, so living beings cannot be isolated from each other. One living system is constantly exchanging information with another.
Any sort of attention, even one’s presence — the very act of a consciousness being present — can affect the relationship.
Mark and indeed all of us attempting to create a science of intention must begin to take account of and test inadvertent influences such as this possibility.

In the last few weeks, I’ve come across two cases where the thoughts of doctors made patients in their charge measurably worse.
After developing a swollen gland under her armpit, a girlfriend of mine went to see her doctor. He took cursory look at her, then pronounced: “I have some bad news. It very well could be lymphoma.”
This was on Friday. Since her blood and other tests would not be carried out until Monday, Deborah had the weekend to digest the fact that she might or might not have cancer.
Then, a woman I’ll call Sandra attending a workshop of mine a week ago was distraught. After suffering numbness and a persistent feeling of pins and needles in her legs, she’d been to the doctor, who’d told her he was convinced that it was multiple sclerosis. Once again, this woman had weeks to consider the possibility that she might be developing a progressive degenerative disease before being given any tests. All her thoughts now, she said, were filled with an image of herself sitting in a wheelchair.
As it turned out, my friend Deborah’s tests came back negative. She had a simple case of swollen glands and in another week, the swelling subsided.
In the case of Sandra, after speaking with her for five minutes, I learned that she had a mouth fill of silver fillings and had recently had one removed.
The kinds of symptoms she experienced often result from simple mercury poisoning and resolve themselves when the fillings are removed. But her symptoms could also result from a B12 deficiency. Who knows until the patient is consulted in depth.
These days it’s fashionable for doctors to level with patients about what they have. But in both cases, what did the instant diagnosis serve? In too many instances, attaching a label to an illness only serves to worsen the disease. It implants the thought, and the thought itself is enough to makes things worse.
Diagnosis – a modern form of cursing
Larry Dossey has called this a hex diagnosis – the medical equivalent of a curse.
One British man in his mid-fifties had highly benign form of leukaemia. He had never been told the true nature of his condition, and a number of years remained well, periodically visiting his local hospital for steroids.
One day he never showed up for his check up. It turned out that he’d looked over his doctor’s shoulder at his case notes and seen the word ‘leukaemia’. After that day he’d gone rapidly downhill. Three weeks later he was dead, even though no one could find any biological cause for his rapid decline.
Saved by her doctor’s thoughts
A doctor’s thoughts and words have everything to do with saving a patient’s life. Some years ago, when my then 78-year-old mother-in-law, Edie, was diagnosed by her local doctor as having end-stage breast cancer. She was told she had three months to live.
As soon as she was given this gloomy prognosis, she began going rapidly downhill —vomiting up her food, collapsing in town.
Fortunately, because of our work we knew of Patrick Kingsley, a medical pioneer in Leicestershire who’d had many cancer survivors.
I was in the room with her when he examined her, and he didn’t flinch when he saw her breast, which at the time looked like raw meat. ‘We can handle that,’ he said with offhand confidence.
His regime was simple — a diet and supplement programme combined intravenous vitamin C.
Several months later, the cancer, which supposedly was beyond hope or treatment, had completely disappeared.
I believe Edie’s cure mostly had to do with the thoughts surrounding her: her certainty that Patrick would cure her and Patrick’s steadfast refusal to make a judgement call about ‘how long’ the illness would linger or how long she would live.
Patients are not a diagnosis and symptoms do not necessarily equal a disease. Every illness is utterly individual — a complex brew of dietary, environmental, mental and emotional challenges. Very few doctors have the humility to realize that no one, no matter how learned, can predict how a given patient will respond to the challenge of illness and healing, or say with certainty who will live and who will die.
Six ways to avoid a hex diagnoses

  • Seek out healers with a reputation for optimism and for giving patients hope.
  • Speak frankly to your doctor about how you’d like him or her to behave with you.
  • Inform him outright that you do not want him ever to give your illness a label or to diagnose what you’ve ‘got’ but to leave it at symptoms.
  • Ask if he or she is willing and able to remain positive, upbeat and optimistic about your progress — no matter how much appears will be against the conventional odds.
  • If your doctor is unwilling to do this, change doctors.
  • For anything but emergencies, in which conventional medicine excels over any form of medicine, consider using some form of alternative medicine. Most alternative regimes do not give illnesses a scary-sounding name, but treat individual symptoms or a symptom ‘picture’.

In my line of work, getting insulted is all in a day’s good work.
Our oeuvre is a perennial target of the orthodoxy. British columnists include us in articles about ‘JUNK SCIENCE’ and liken The Field to Star Wars. A skeptic once claimed that listening to me was like listening to Martha Stewart after she’d baked and eaten hash brownies.
I was eight months pregnant with my first daughter when we launched WDDTY. Moments before I was due to appear on a TV debate with a prominent doctor columnist, he leaned over and informed me, sotto voce, that my obstetrician, an active birth specialist, was up on charges of incompetence.
Being spat upon by someone, somewhere is the prerequisite of a journalistic job well done. Otherwise, all you are doing is public relations.
I tell you all this to emphasize how surprised I was be derailed by a fairly mild exchange that occurred recently during a seminar I’d been teaching at The Crossings in Austin, Texas. An older woman approached me in the break and spent some minutes agitatedly complaining that she couldn’t understand what I was saying, it was all far too much, too fast, and I’d been a waste of her good money. I attempted to reason with her, but she seemed clearly agitated. After I refused to allow her to put up information about a website, she looked at me uncomprehendingly for a moment, before reaching for her best shot: “You are a. . . a. . .JOKE!”
Given the kind of insults that usually get lobbed our way, this was extraordinarily tame, but for some reason, it got to me. It may have been something to do with the fact that it was Mother’s day in the UK, which I hadn’t known when we booked the date, and I’d been acutely aware that I was more than 4000 miles away from my husband and two children.
I decided to handle it all publicly, particularly since we’d just discussed negative intention and how to protect yourself from it. I announced what had happened to the group and asked the woman to please leave (she already had, as it turned out). As I attempted to resume, I found myself inexplicably beginning to tear up.
Tunnel of love
And then something remarkable happened. One by one, a number of the audience members stood up, walked to the front of the room, and began to lock arms around me. I became entirely encased in a group hug that was five persons deep from all sides. I felt an enormous current surge through me, which immediately changed my state, shook off the negative vibes, and left me laughing and restored. A perfect antedote to negative intention. Shame we couldn’t have given the woman a group hug, too.
Talk about a Circle of Life.
Try this at home or at work. If you become aware of some malevolent intention, ask those around you or your loved ones, to circle around you, arms locked, and to send you loving intention. Allow yourself to remain in your Tunnel of Love until faith is restored.
Homing thought

While in that circle, I also thought of what Dr. John Diamond, who first discovered behavioral kinesiology (muscle testing of toxic thoughts) calls the ‘homing thought’. Diamond discovered one thought that could overcome any sort of negative influence, or debilitating idea or situation.
The homing thought that each of us can hold on to is our ultimate aspiration or purpose in life: each person’s special gift or talent that not only gives one a sense of joy but also union with the Absolute. Dr. Diamond uses the term ‘homing thought’ because it reminds him of the direction finder that lost aeroplane pilots use to find their way home.
‘It holds us steadfast,’ he once wrote, ‘on our course.’
Whenever we are besieged by the darkest of intentions, we might best protect ourselves when holding on to the thought of what we have been born to do.

Why wait any longer when you’ve already been waiting your entire life?

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