We’ve now got back the scientific results of the Middle Eastern Peace Intention Experiment I ran on November 9, 2017. For those of you who haven’t heard about it, I’d been in touch with Tsipi Raz, an Israeli documentary maker, about carrying out an Intention Experiment for Jerusalem, and by some amazing fortuitous synchronicity, we decided to hold the experiment during the time that Dr. Salah Al-Rashed, the Deepak Chopra of the Middle East, was running a Middle Eastern summit remotely from a studio he’d acquired in the UK. He and Tsipi began meeting with me via Skype to plan an Intention Experiment for peace with both Arab and Israeli participants, made possible because of Salah’s ingenious technological set up.

In a small backwater warehouse in southern England, Salah has created Smarts Way studio, with the technological capacity to beam out a facilitator sitting in the studio to nine different screens anywhere in the world. For this particular summit he’d arranged for cameras and monitors to be placed in hotel conference rooms, each full of Arabs, in various cities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Oman, Bahrain, Jordan and Tunisia; with his permission, I arranged with Tsipi for the ninth camera and monitor to be placed in Gerard Bechar Theatre in Jerusalem, where hundreds of Israeli Jews from Jerusalem would be gathered together for a special one-day peace event, to culminate in our experiment.
All nine screens were lit up on my screen, and a screen showing me was visible to all nine audiences, so they could observe me running the experiment. The entire experiment and its aftermath were also beamed live to other participants from all over the world, watching live via my YouTube channel.
Peace to Jerusalem
All of us came together to send intention to the Old City of Jerusalem. We chose the site as a symbolic gesture of peace because it is the spiritual heart of the three main religions, a place that belongs to the entire world without preference for a single faith, and we’d targeted the Damascus Gate region because it has suffered increased violence after new security measures were put in place.
Through the ingenuity of Dr. Al-Rashed’s technical team, the technology was interactive; I could call on people from any one of the nine audiences, at which point their screen would be shown to me and the other eight locations, with each group from the different countries able to speak to me and to the people in the other eight windows.
Both Arabs and Jews from all the audiences were crying and laughing as they recognized the common humanity in each other. A woman from Abu Dhabi said she had seen visions of Israelis dancing with Palestinians during the experiment. A woman from Jerusalem described her visions of Israeli soldiers hugging Arabs, and another envisioned a wedding with an Arab man dancing with a Jewish woman.
“I love you, I love you so much,” said Fatima from Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, to the Jews in Jerusalem, blowing them kisses. “Your God is my God.”
‘We love you, sister,” called out people from the Israeli audience.
“It’s so overwhelming the possibility of being connected with you, our sisters in Amman and Damascus and in Iran and all over,” said Lily, speaking for several Israeli women’s peace groups. “We are hundreds of thousands of women here, saying ‘Enough!’ It’s a time of compassion. It’s a time of healing. Thank you, dearest sisters, we are one.”
The story about the experiment broke immediately all across the Middle East. That night, Salah showed me the Twitter feed from a prominent parliamentary member in Kuwait, who acknowledged the experiment as a wonderful mechanism for promoting peaceful relations. As Time Out Israel wrote, “While peace in the Middle East is neither black nor white, it's the small efforts like this meditation event that slowly start to make a difference.”
Peaceful participants
And then there was the reaction of our thousands of participants on YouTube. They came from all over the US, from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and the UK, most of Europe, the Arab countries and Jerusalem, but also more exotic, far-flung places: Australia, Brazil, Japan, Thailand, Hungary, Finland, Columbia, South Africa.
“While I was waiting on YouTube and watching all the people in the Chat box send messages of love, peace, healing etc. I immediately could feel the energy and to look at the number of people that were just there,” wrote one participant. “And to see where everyone was coming in from across the planet, that was overwhelming just in itself, and I was already crying before we even got to the live feed.”
“I first started working in that region in Saudi Arabia in 1975, so to hear Arabs from SA send love to Jews in Israel just blew me away,” wrote another. “I am also aware of the restrictive cultures that . . . exist in the Middle East and thus the courage I perceived exhibited by the Arabs who publicly took part in this Intention – that, too, was deeply moving to me.”
“My entire perception of the people of the Middle East really changed. . . . We mostly only hear about the violence there, so it truly brought it home to see faces and hear voices of people who care deeply. . . . And this gave me so much hope, it brought it into reality, beyond just my own hopes and prayers. I felt a part of something much larger, much more powerful than myself.”
As I only had the opportunity to run this for a single day, rather than our usual protocol of running the experiment repeatedly for at least six days, we decided not to examine any changes in violence. Nevertheless, Dr. Roger Nelson examined the REG output for his Global Consciousness Project, for this and the St. Louis experiment, and discovered that the machines had reacted strongly to the window of our intention, in just the direction they had in every earlier Peace Intention Experiments –one more ripple effect of peace in the hearts of the participants that could eventually extend out to the entire world.
“You know, you are doing more than ‘research’,” wrote one participant after the experiment had finished, “you are breaking open people’s hearts.” Perhaps these experiments carry one simple truism. To solve a seemingly intractable political situation, the fastest and most effective way forward in a war zone may not be through the military, politics, diplomacy or even economic initiatives.
All you may need are people coming together as a group and praying as one.