While we’re assembling our final figures for the Peace intention Experiment (a task made more difficult because the Sri Lankan government recently banned the media from reporting on casualties – so our latest figures are tougher to come by), we are still getting in fascinating ideas about what to feature in the coming months. 

Thirty-five per cent of you who filled out our survey indicated you’d like to carry out large-scale Intentions of the Week, sending intention to people with health challenges.

We’ll be starting our new Intentions of the Week on a special web platform next week that will re-create the same type of pages we used for the Peace Intention Experiment.

But we need to hear from you about your favorite targets for these informal experiments (that is, ones where I don’t have a scientific team analyzing the results). 

So, I need your nominees – worthy people with health challenges or other difficulties who need our group intention.  When you nominate someone, please sent a photo of the person to: cs@livingthefield.com, with the following information:

• full name
• age
• location (city/town, country)
• Full description of illness or other challenge

If you’d like to nominate something else besides a person, please send it here or comment on this blog, below. 

The vast majority of you filling out our survey wanted to run the formal scientific quarterly experiments on peace and other scientific subjects, and we’ll be investigating running another large-scale experiment in January or February 2008, again with a scientific team analyzing the results. 

But a good 60 per cent of you also discussed the ideas of running monthly peace or other more ‘informal’ experiments with a particular target (let’s say, the American economy, for instance). 

In this case, we won’t analyze them scientifically; we’ll just send out intentions as a large group, experience our group effect, observe any observable changes in our target and enjoy the effect of group peace in our own lives.

One suggested a regular cycle, to refer her Unity church to.  We’ll can this up with our regular Intention of the Week and our informal monthly intentions.

If you’d like to participate in our monthly experiments, please nominate a specific target, on this blog, or by sending your choice to cs@livingthefield.com.

Remember:  intention works best when it’s highly specific, so please send in very specific targets.

A few wrote in to say they’d like intention sent to animals and the plight of other creatures; others, that we should send intention to the Belgian Congo, which is experiencing so much difficulty.   So let us know, by email or blog, below.

Please tell us your views on our survey

If you participated in the Peace Intention Experiment but haven’t answered the survey yet, please join in with the thousands of others to let us know how it was for you and whether you are still experiencing peace in your life.  Remember: we’ll keep your details confidential and you’ll be contributing to vital scientific research. So, please, just take a moment to fill out the survey by clicking here.

More permanent changes

We’re still hearing from people who say their lives changed from the Peace Intention Experiment; one wrote in to say that he began to make a daily peace ‘meditation’ a daily part of his life, which is changing his entire life. 

A number of you wondered why we had the experiment carry on for eight days; as you may recall, we were trying to shape the experiment to resemble the kinds of experiments carried out by the Transcendental Meditation organization, which examined the effect of mass meditation on lowering crime and conflict.  Their minimum times were at least a week, so we felt that we should replicate this as closely as possible. They experienced a 10 per cent decrease, which is why we specified 10 per cent ourselves. It may well be that we won’t have to, in future.  Our final data will tell us.

As for how we can improve, aside from the technical issues (and I’ve had many computer people volunteer to help out in future), a good number of you asked if we could avoid pictures of violence of death in future.  “A couple of the days, I had to cover the photos of guns and bodies.  I could not stand to see them.”  

One mentioned that as his eyes are closed when he gets into this state, it would be helpful to have a bell at the beginning of the Powering up phase, and every time the page changes.

Many people asked if they could just send intention whenever they could, rather than at the specified time.  I’m asking you all to participate at the same moment, because we’re measuring the effect of mass intention at the same moment (particularly with the Global Consciousness Project’s REG machines). Furthermore, our participants tell us that they find the experience of joining together in a single place (our website) with thousands of people around the world at the exact same moment palpable and blissful. 

Nevertheless, in the future we will look into ways that people can participate who don’t have access to a computer. A few of you discussed the idea of logging into a designated site and downloading the target information beforehand.

Others from foreign countries asked for translations (into Dutch, Spanish, Greek and French), which we’ll try to effect next year.

The Australians asked for a better time for the experiment (we’ll do it later in the day so it’s a friendlier time for you.) 

One person wrote, “I would precede the experiment with a week in which participants practice linking with one another.” That is a great idea – it would also help us to monitor the website before the experiment.

Let us know your views of future experiments, below or by writing to cs@livingthefield.com.

More fascinating information about how you participated

Two-thirds to three-fourths of our respondents participated on all the days of the experiment, although 54 per cent had some trouble accessing the site and have many ideas for next time, which I’ll share with you next week.

Some 88 per cent participated on their computer, with 7 per cent, who knew the target was Sri Lanka, but who either couldn’t get on the site or didn’t try to, participating at the right time offline.  Another 2 per cent didn’t know the target was Sri Lanka, but just sent a good intention at the appropriate time.

PCs of some variety were the implement of choice, with nearly 89 per cent using some variety of one, and only 12 percent on an iMac.  Nevertheless, 0.8 per cent of our group participated from their iPhone or Danger Hiptop.

Although the overwhelming majority were from the US, and Canada, we had a large contingency from every country in Western Europe, with Eastern European represented by Russia, Slovenia and Hungary.

Besides many participants from Australia and New Zealand, our more far-flung participants live in Trinidad, Malaysia, Bostwana and Thailand. Peace intentions poured in from Israel but also from the UAE Pakistan, Lebanon and Qatar.

One day I’d like to compare outcomes from intention novices, versus those who are experienced to see whether experience (and technique) improve outcome, as it has in our early experiments.

Warm wishes,

Lynne McTaggart