Plans are growing for our Peace Intention Experiment, which is fast turning into a ‘Live Aid’ of Intention Experiments, with the potential of hundreds of thousands of participants.
We have now set a date of September 14 for the Peace Intention Experiment, so put it in your diary today and if you haven’t already, please register at www.theintentionexperiment.com.
These will be the start of an ambitious series of scientific studies to determine whether ‘group mind’ has the power to lower violence in areas chosen for high crime and violence levels.
We are working closely with the Association for Global New Thought — an umbrella group of all new thought churches — and we chose September 14 to coincide with the Unity Church’s Eleven Days of Unity.
The plan is for our first target to be in the Middle East, as a fitting antidote to all the negative press that will be focused on the anniversary of 9/11. If we can get the correct violence figures from Iraq, we will make that the target.
An accidental “Live Aid”
I began thinking about running a Peace Intention Experiment more than a year ago. The plan was to have my readers send intention to a series of 'hot spots' around the world and to measure violence levels before and after. These experiments would build upon the original Transcendental Meditation studies, which showed that when a critical mass of people in a city meditate, the crime rate goes down.
When I mentioned this idea to Deepak Chopra, he said: ‘I’d l like our Alliance for New Humanity to be involved.' The same occurred when I told Ananda Giri of the Oneness Foundation about the experiments. Then Barbara Fields of the AGNT got excited and offered her group’s support, and after that the Unity churches, the Spiritual Cinema Circle, plus dozens of radio shows like the World Puja Network followed suit.
Before I knew it, I was faced with the possibility of hundreds of thousands of 'intenders' participating in this experiment. My one little thought about a Peace experiment had grown overnight into Live Aid.
Server challenges
This 'big idea' of course has a number of challenges — and here’s where I need your help.
The biggest challenge of all is finding an internet system sophisticated enough to allow thousands of people around the world to open and stare at the same web page at exactly the same moment. Allowing in such sizeable simultaneous traffic requires a vast amount of extra web capacity – as Oprah Winfrey recently discovered when her web transmission of Eckhart Tolle’s seminar repeatedly crashed.
The current Intention Experiment studies run on Ning, a social network offering individual organizations instant facilities for a community-based website. This enables The Intention Experiment website to have access to some 500 linked servers.
Nevertheless, we need a better protocol and more server power to ensure that the system holds up during these giant experiments.
Two important elements of our Intention Experiments include: 1) tracking each and every participant and 2) allowing everyone to experience the feeling of ‘joining together’ at a central meeting place on the internet. Thousands of readers have remarked on the special, palpable feeling of oneness that is generated by the sense that others are there ‘on the page’ at the same time.
So we still need to be able to allow all those hundreds of thousands of people to come onto our web page at the same moment.
Web gurus: a special forum for you
That’s why I’m enlisting all you web gurus out there – to help solve the server issues or to donate server power.
I’d like to create a special Intention Experiment web forum this week for all of you to correspond with me and any other web experts who’d like to help out. Thus far, we’ve had some 10 people come forward, recommending load-balancing servers, or static pages, or even clones of the software and database.
If you have some good ideas or good connections with vast server power, and you’re interested in becoming part of a discussion group of web experts discussing ingenious ways to run this experiment, please write in to cs@livingthefield.com. We'll be in touch shortly.
Wise elder scientists signing up
I’m also busily recruiting other gurus for the scientific arm of the experiment. Roger Nelson of the Global Consciousness Project, and Brenda Dunne (with Robert Jahn), formerly of the PEAR laboratory at Princeton University are joining Dr. Gary Schwartz and Dr. Rustum Roy as a panel of ‘wise elders’ to advise me in the design of the scientific experiments. The plan is to have such a panel with expert statisticians select both the targets and design the exact way in which the scientific experiments will run.
Besides their decades of experience in running scientific investigations into human consciousness, Nelson, Jahn and Dunne all are sticklers for detail and so will be wonderful help in devising an air-tight protocol.