It’s getting increasingly difficult to read the papers or tune into the nightly news. In addition to updates about the various wars exploding around the world and the need for our countries to re-arm themselves, there’s always some gristly murder or starving child to finish off the evening.

But did you ever think that you are contributing to this negative conversation?

We comfort ourselves by thinking that positive thoughts always prevail over negative thoughts. The good thoughts always win, don’t they?

Nope, they don’t. The problem is that intention doesn’t have a morality. Negative thoughts affect things just as much as positive thoughts do.

Think of a study carried out by the psychologist Dick Blasband years ago.  Blasband was intrigued by the theories of Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian psychiatrist and one-time protégé of Sigmund Freud, who thought it possible to trap ‘orgone’ – the name he gave to what he believed to be omnipresent cosmic energy – in an orgone energy ‘accumulator.’

This box-like enclosure of any size could be made of alternating layers of any metal and non-metallic materials like cotton cloth or felt. The theory was that orgone energy would continuously flow between the atmosphere and the box, like a current of air, and so constantly ‘accumulate’.

Reich had early encouraging results with animals and plants placed in the boxes, which lay the basis for his later claims that accumulated energy had an immense capacity to heal.

It occurred to Blasband that Reich’s ideas about energy fields were not dissimilar to those of his colleague, the late Fritz-Albert Popp, and his work on biophotons. Perhaps the best means of testing an accumulator was to measure its effect on the emission of that tiny current of light constantly emanating from a living thing.

Blasband traveled to Popp’s international Institute in Kaiserslautern, Germany, and he and Popp created a variety of orgone accumulators, then chose a number of plants in Popp’s laboratory to be the experimental population. Popp’s photomultipliers would count the light emissions of all the plants inside and outside the orgone boxes and record any differences.

Every one of the tests failed. No amount of exposure to an accumulator of any variety seemed to make one bit of difference to the health or well-being of any of the plants.

So then Blasband decided to test whether an intention could boost the action of the accumulators. In his new series of experiments, Blasband sent an intention for the energy within the accumulator to be beneficial to certain seedlings and then sent other intentions for the energy to be harmful to others.

The results were shocking.  The only effective intention appeared to be the one he had sent to stunt their growth. In both experiments, negative intention was more powerful than positive intention.

Thoughts to harm had the greatest effect.

So what does this have to do with you in today’s tumultuous world?  You have about 70,000 thoughts a day, a good majority of which are negative: all your worry, uncertainty, fear, even despair. And those thoughts create a steady stream of information beaming out into the world, contributing to the overall toxic conversation, deepening the dark mood of the world.

Blasband’s study was small, but there are many others of negative intention sent consciously or otherwise showing big effects and they carry a huge implication: even your current state of mind carries an intention that has an effect on life around you. The mind continues affecting its surroundings whether or not we are consciously sending an intention. To think is to affect. Most research about negative intention concerns a conscious desire to harm something.

And from the evidence we’ve just seen in my Intention Experiment last January, these scattergun negative thoughts are harming you, too.  In the study of my audience, we found that the 44 volunteers who had their biophotons measured were ‘sympathetic nervous system dominant’:  they were living in a constant state of fight or flight, as we likely all are right now.

Nevertheless, after they'd participated in our 10-minute Intention Experiment for peace in Washington D.C., when we measured them again their nervous systems had significantly shifted.  Their stress had calmed, and their nervous systems had largely rebalanced.

There are several quick solutions to adding to the negative conversation besides avoiding the standard nightly news.  First, carry out group intention:  it’s a fast track to rebalancing yourself and lowering stress.

Join my Intention Circles.  As I’ll be reporting next week, we’ve had some amazing situations with our participants, who have had a giant shot of positivity that is lasting.

And finally, seek out the positive in the news.  I live in Britain, which has everything wrong with it at the moment:  crumbling economy, health system, law enforcement, you name it.

I just read today of a cross party group calling themselves ‘Fix Britain’ made up of people from all political parties and all industries, and the plan is to work together to overhaul government with accountable methods used to good effect in places like Denmark.

And then there’s the newly appointed members of the Centers for Disease Control in the US (the old, Big Pharma friendly guard have all been fired), which plans, at long last, to study the long-term effect of childhood vaccination, believe it or not, for the very first time.

And of course the thousands of organizations out there who are making a positive difference to the world.

And if you still can’t find any positive news around you, make some yourself.  There’s a lot to do, just where you live.

Like that famous instruction from the Shawshank Redemption: ‘Get busy living, or get busy dying.’

Never submit to the dark news around you.  There is so much good to live for.  Just make sure that you are part of the good, making a positive difference.