While we’re all absorbing the enormity of the implications of this historic American election, I thought I would share with you another bit of history in the making – the first extraordinary scientific results of the Peace Intention Experiment.
Roger Nelson, architect of Global Consciousness Project and a member of our scientific team, has been busy analyzing the effect of our Peace Intention Experiment on the random event generators he continuously runs all over the world.
Several analyses reveal that the REG machines were affected within a 40-minute window of meditations during the eight days of our Peace Intention Experiment, and that these changes were similar to those that occurred during moments of mass meditation in areas attempting to lower violence.
When analyzed over the entire week, Nelson and his colleagues found a consistent daily pattern. Increases in order of the REG output were similar to the changes we specified in our protocol, during the 20 minutes of preparation, or ‘Powering Up’, of viewing the Sri Lanka target and then of the 10 minutes of actually sending intention..  Although the machines demonstrated a change during the Powering Up stage, when our participants were getting ready to participate, the effect was most striking during the actual 10 minutes of our experiment.
“In particular, the steep negative slope of the data during the 10-min meditation looks like that seen in our examination of data during Transcendental Meditation gatherings of advanced meditators,’ writes Dr. Nelson. ‘These ‘social calming’ experiments served as one of the models for the peace intention experiment.”
If you recall, the Peace Intention Experiment was sparked by the numerous TM studies showing that when a critical mass of meditators regularly meditate in an area, the crime rate or armed conflict goes down.
But the TM studies simply examine the effect of ‘attention’ and calming practices like meditation. Our experiment took their work one step further by examining what happens when a large group sends a highly specific intention to make a change.
For the full report, complete with graphs, please click here.
How the GCP works
An REG, built to examine the effect of mind on machine, performs the electronic, twenty-first century equivalent of a toss of a coin.
The output of these machines (the computerized equivalent of heads or tails) is controlled by a randomly alternating frequency of positive and negative pulses. Because their activity is utterly random, they produce ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ each roughly 50 per cent of the time, according to the laws of probability.
Nelson has organized a centralized computer program, so that REGs located in 50 places around the globe and running continuously pour their continuous stream of random bits of data into one vast central hub through the Internet.
Periodically, Nelson and his colleagues study these outpourings and compare them with the biggest breaking news stories, attempting to rout out any sort of statistical connection. Standardized methods and analysis revealed any demonstration of order – a moment when the machine output displayed less randomness than usual – and whether the time that it had been generated corresponded with that of a major world event.
To date, they have compared this output with hundreds of   top news events, including the death of the Princess of Wales, the 9/11 tragedy, the reactions to the war in Iraq and President Bush. Whenever people reacted with great joy or horror to a major event, the machines seem to react as well. Furthermore, the degree of ‘order’ in the machine’s output seemed to match the emotional intensity of the event, particularly those that had been tragic: the greater the horror, the greater the order
Why this result is so important

Dr Nelson cautions us that a single study like this only produces a tiny statistical effect, and so we’ll only really know if we have scientific ‘proof’ of an effect if we repeat this kind of study numerous times more.  Nevertheless, the fact that we showed an effect every day of the study and demonstrated a surge of change just during the 10- minute window of the actual experiment, he says, shows ‘an important demonstration of the effect of consciousness and sensitivity of the GCP network at an unexpected level of detail’.
Join our Peace Intention Experiment survey

Now that enough time has passed for us to analyze the true effect of our intentions and gather our final scientific evidence, we need your input, too. 
We need to know how you participated, whether you had any trouble, and what exactly happened during and after the experiment to you personally. 
For instance, did you experience peace in your own life?
We’ve assembled a simple on-line survey for you. This questionnaire will not ask for individual details, like your full name or address, but will ask for details about your experience of the Peace Experiment and its aftermath.  Any information you give us will only be used in scientific papers or as part of my own reports on the experiment on this e-news and elsewhere.  Nothing will be used that could identify you personally. 
Please take the five minutes to participate. Your help will provide us with invaluable data about this experiment and offer suggestions about how to improve our system for future Intention Experiments.
Thanks so much in advance for taking a moment to fill out the survey by clicking here.
This clever bit of on-line software will automatically collate your answers for us, and I’ll report back to you soon.
See you on Las Ramblas

This weekend I will be in Barcelona speaking at Deepak Chopra’s  Alliance for New Humanity forum and running a workshop on intention.  For any of you planning to attend, do be sure to come by and say hi.
Warm wishes,
Lynne McTaggart