Presently, I’m in the midst of collating more information about our recent Water into Wine Intention Experiment, including what happened to our participants. Each time, a small miracle happens — a miracle I continue to try to understand.
As you know, our ongoing Intention Experiment runs on two levels. We both conduct our large-scale well-controlled scientific experiments and also informal intentions within our community or during my workshops for people with health or financial challenges.

The power of eight
One of the most powerful aspects of this phenomenon is what I like to call the ‘power of eight’. Growing evidence in The Intention Experiment community demonstrates the extraordinary power and life-enhancing experience of creating a small ‘tribe’ of eight to twelve likeminded individuals to replace the largely competitive or anonymous relationship we experience in our usual modern neighborhoods.
For a number of years, I have supported the creation of micro communities of eight or more on my Intention Experiment website, who correspond solely through the website but nevertheless develop close and supportive relationships.
After regularly communicating and forming strong, cohesive bonds, these small groups have demonstrated effects that are nothing short of miraculous: accident victims heal far faster than their doctors predicted and even lost causes get saved.
Instant bonding
This type of powerful bonding can occur in a single day. When I have taken my intention experiments on the road, and asked groups of complete strangers to send healing intention for each other in during my workshops, we’ve witnessed, quite literally overnight, that people’s lifelong illnesses have started to clear.
During our Living with Intention weekend workshops, we divide the audience of attendees into small groups of eight, teach them techniques of group intention and have them practice healing intention on members of their group with health challenges.
On the final day of the workshop, we ask both healers and healees to share any physical or psychological changes, for better or worse, that they’ve experienced over the weekend. Once again, we are witness to stories of seemingly miraculous healings.
During my last workshop in Amsterdam on February 5-7, I filmed some of the recipients of intention, because their stories were so remarkable. We’ve made two videos, and here’s the second one – You’ll see Wayne, who suffered from a phobia against women, experience a real shift of his fear, and two other women with physical problems experience pain relief. You can see and hear their stories here:
http://www.youtube.com/intentionexperiment
Healing the healers
We also hear extraordinary stories of the healers themselves enjoying physical and psychological improvements. Healing intention in a group appears to profoundly affect the healers as well.
In Amsterdam, when sending intention, many members of the audience also began to experience and share the thoughts of the recipients. One woman with a spinal problem imagined having surgery during the intention and two members of her group saw the same scene in their minds’ eyes. Heddy, a woman with osteoarthritis, had such a powerful effect that she began to shake during the intention – as did all the people in her group sending her intention.
When it was over, a number of people approached me to say they’d felt something extraordinary in the room that still lingered on in them.
In our large on-line experiments we have many reports of ecstatic experiences – a sense of oneness with the group and even with the sample of water. With our Water into Wine Experiment, many of our readers reported feeling at one with the water, or even experiencing a profound sensation of tasting the wine.
Sense of oneness
As always, I’m fascinated by this experience and how each of us, in our separate computers dotted all over the world, can simply come on the website and feel a palpable sense of connection with other people sharing an experience thousands of miles away.
But perhaps the interesting is the longer-term effect upon participants; the early results of our Water into Wine survey is no exception. A good per cent of our participants noticed changes in their relationships with others during the experiment, notably between parents and children, in-laws of every variety or siblings.
Many, if not most, either felt more love for their loved ones or for people they normally dislike or argue with.
Nevertheless, each time, the biggest change – usually affecting a majority or the most substantial minority, had to do with the number of people who now feel more love for anyone with whom they come into contact. Most of these people say are now getting along better with perfect strangers.
In fact, when asked with whom relationships most improved, the largest group said they noticed the biggest change in their relationships with strangers. The experience of working together with thousands of strangers give many people the ability to be more accepting of people they don’t personally know.
Staying with the body
So, what is ‘it’ — this feeling of oneness everyone claims to be feeling? It is, I believe, the wagon-train effect. Joan Didion, in her essay ‘On Morality’ in her book Slouching Toward Bethlehem, makes the point that the most fundamental promise we make to one another, the most basic of our social contracts, is that we will maintain our basic loyalties — we will, in effect, stay with the sick or the dead until help arrives.
We’ll protect each other from the naked elements, we’ll stay with a dead body, we’ll support each other through adversity, we keep the promises we make to each other.
There is the basic sense, all but forgotten in modern society, that we will support each other through thick and thin. So powerful is the essential nature of the social contract – and our all-but-forgotten sense of belonging and being loved within a group — that it can act as one of our most potent healers.
It reminds us of the most fundamental promise we make to one another: we won’t abandon each other to the wolves, in which ever guise they come.