The Field

by Lynne McTaggart

  Our ability to pick up signals also increases during the kind of deep interpersonal connection examined by Braud. When two people ‘relax’ their bandwidths and attempt to establish some kind of deep connection, their brain patterns become highly synchronized.

  Studies in Mexico similar to Braud’s, where a pair of volunteers in separate rooms were asked to feel each other’s presence, showed that the brain waves of both participants, as measured by EEG readings, began to synchronize. At the same time, electrical activity within each hemisphere of the brain of each participant also synchronized, a phenomenon which usually only occurs in meditation. Nevertheless, it was the participant with the most cohesive brain-wave patterns who tended to influence the other. The most ordered brain pattern always prevailed.30

  In this circumstance, a type of ‘coherent domain’ gets established, just as with molecules of water. The ordinary boundary of separateness is crossed. The brain of each member of the pair becomes less highly tuned in to their own separate information and more receptive to that of the other. In effect, they pick up someone else’s information from the Zero Point Field as if it were their own.

  As quantum mechanics govern living systems, quantum uncertainty and probability are features of all our bodily processes. We are walking REG machines. At any moment of our lives, any one of the microscopic processes that make up our mental and physical existence can be influenced to take one of many paths. In the circumstance of Braud’s studies, in which two people have a ‘synchronized’ bandwidth, the observer with the greater degree of coherence, or order, influences the probabilistic processes of the less organized recipient. The more ordered of Braud’s pairs affects some quantum state in the more disordered other and nudges it to toward a greater degree of order.

  Laszlo believes that this notion of ‘expanded’ bandwidth would account for a number of puzzling and highly detailed reports of people who undergo regression therapy or claim to remember past lives, a phenomenon which mainly occurs among very young children.31 EEG studies of the brains of children under five show that they permanently function in alpha mode – the state of altered consciousness in an adult – rather than the beta mode of ordinary mature consciousness. Children are open to far more information in The Field than the average adult. In effect, a child walks around in a state of a permanent hallucination. If a small child claims to remember a past life, the child might not be able to distinguish his own experiences from someone else’s information, as stored in the Zero Point Field. Some common trait – a disability or special gift, say – might trigger an association, and the child would pick up this information as if it were his own past-life ‘memory’. It is not reincarnation, but just accidentally tuning into somebody else’s radio station by someone who has the capacity to receive a large number of stations at any one time.32

  The model suggested by Braud’s work is of a universe, to some degree, under our control. Our wishes and intentions create our reality. We might be able to use them to have a happier life, to block unfavorable influences, to keep ourselves enclosed in a protective fence of goodwill. Be careful what you wish for, thought Braud. Each of us has the ability to make it come true.

  In his own casual and quiet way, Braud began testing out this idea, using intentions to achieve certain outcomes. It only seemed to work, he discovered, when he used gentle wishing, rather than intense willing or striving. It was like trying to will yourself to sleep: the harder you try, the more you interfere with the process. It seemed to Braud that humans operated on two levels – the hard, motivated striving of the world and the relaxed, passive, receptive world of The Field – and the two seemed incompatible. Over time, when Braud’s desired outcomes seemed to occur more often than expected by chance, he developed a reputation as a ‘good wisher.’33

  Braud’s work offered further proof of what many other scientists were beginning to realize. Our natural state of being is a relationship – a tango – a constant state of one influencing the other. Just as the subatomic particles that compose us cannot be separated from the space and particles surrounding them, so living beings cannot be isolated from each other. A living system of greater coherence could exchange information and create or restore coherence in a disordered, random or chaotic system. The natural state of the living world appeared to be order – a drive toward greater coherence. Negentropy appeared to be the stronger force. By the act of observation and intention, we have the ability to extend a kind of superradiance to the world.

  This tango appears to extend to our thoughts as well as our bodily processes. Our dreams, as well as our waking hours, may be shared between ourselves and everyone who has ever lived. We carry on an incessant dialogue with The Field, enriching as well as taking from it. Many of humankind’s greatest achievements may result from an individual suddenly gaining access to a shared accumulation of information – a collective effort in the Zero Point Field – in what we consider a moment of inspiration. What we call ‘genius’ may simply be a greater ability to access the Zero Point Field. In that sense, our intelligence, creativity and imagination are not locked in our brains but exist as an interaction with The Field.34

  The most fundamental question Braud’s work raises has to do with individuality. Where does each of us end and where do we begin? If every outcome, each event, was a relationship and thoughts were a communal process, we may need a strong community of good intention to function well in the world. Many other studies have shown that strong community involvement was one of the most important indicators of health.35

  The most interesting example of this was a small town in Pennsylvania called Roseto. This tiny town was entirely populated with immigrants from the same area of Italy. Along with the people themselves, their culture had been transplanted in its entirety. The town shared a very cohesive sense of community; rich lived cheek by jowl with poor, but such was the sense of interrelation that jealousy seemed to be minimized. Roseto had an amazing health record. Despite the prevalence of a number of high-risk factors in the community – smoking, economic stress, high-fat diets – the people of Roseto had a heart-attack rate less than half that of neighboring towns.

  One generation later, the cohesiveness of the town broke up; the youth didn’t carry on the sense of community, and before long it began to resemble a typical American town – a collection of isolated individuals. In parallel, the heart-attack rate quickly escalated to that of its neighbors.36 For those few precious years, Roseto had been coherent.

  Braud had shown that human beings trespass over individual boundaries. What he didn’t yet know was how far we could travel.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Extended Eye

  DOWN IN THE BASEMENT of a physics building at Stanford University, the tiniest flicker of the tiniest fragments of the world were being captured and measured. The device required to measure the movement of subatomic particles resembled nothing so much as a three-foot hand mixer. The magnetometer was attached to an output device whose frequency is a measure of the rate of change of magnetic field. It oscillated ever so slightly, grinding out its slowly undulating S-curve on an x – y recorder, a paper graph, with annoying regularity. To the untrained eye, quarks were sedentary: nothing ever changed on the graph. A non-physicist might look upon this gadget as something akin to a souped-up pendulum.

  A Stanford physics student named Arthur Hebard had seen the superconducting differential magnetometer as a fitting post-doctoral occupation, applying for grant money to devise an instrument impervious to all but the flux in the electromagnetic field caused by any quarks which happened to be passing by. Nevertheless, to anyone who understood about measuring quarks, it was a delicate business. It necessitated blocking out virtually all the endless electromagnetic chatter of the universe in order to hear the infinitesimal language of a subatomic particle. To accomplish this, the magnetometer’s innards needed to be encased in layer upon layer of shielding – copper shielding, aluminium casing, a superconducting niobium shield, even μ-metal shie
lding, a metal which specifically limits magnetic field. The device was then buried in a concrete well in the floor of the lab. The SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device) was a bit of a mystery at Stanford – seen but not understood. No one had ever published its complex inner construction.

  To Hal Puthoff, the magnetometer was a quackbuster. He looked upon it as the perfect test of whether there was such a thing as psychic power. He was open-minded enough to test whether psychokinesis worked, but not really convinced. Hal had grown up in Ohio and Florida, but liked to say he was from Missouri – the Show Me state, the ultimate state of the skeptic. Show me, prove it to me, let me see how it works. Scientific principles were a comforting refuge for him, the best way he could get a handle on reality. The multiple layers of shielding erected around the magnetometer would present the ultimate challenge for Ingo Swann, the psychic, whose plane was arriving from New York that afternoon. He would spring the thing on Swann. Just let him see if he could alter the pattern of a machine impervious to anything short of an atomic explosion.

  It was 1972, the year before he’d begun working on his Zero Point Field theories, when Hal was still at SRI. Even at that time, before he’d thought about the implications of quantum zero-point fluctuations, Hal was interested in the possibility of interconnection between living things. But at this stage, he didn’t really have a focus, much less a theory. He’d been dabbling in tachyons, or particles that travel faster than the speed of light. He’d wondered whether tachyons could explain some studies he’d come across showing that animals and plants had the ability to engage in some sort of instantaneous communication, even when separated by hundreds of miles or shielded by a variety of means. Hal had really wanted to find out whether you could use quantum theory to describe life processes. Like Mitchell and Popp, he’d long suspected that everything in the universe on its most basic level had quantum properties, which would mean that there ought to be nonlocal effects between living things. He’d been kicking around an idea that if electrons had nonlocal effects, this might mean something extraordinary on a large scale in the world, particularly in living things – some means of acquiring or receiving information instantaneously. At the time, all he had in mind to test this assumption was a modest study, mainly involving a bit of algae, which Bill Church was eventually persuaded to invest $10,000 in.

  Hal had sent the proposal to Cleve Backster, a New York polygraph expert who’d been carrying out studies, just for fun, to see if plants register any ‘emotion’ – in the form of electrical signaling – on standard lie detector equipment, the same way humans do in response to stress. These were the studies that had so fascinated Hal. Backster tried burning the leaf of a plant and then measured its galvanic response, much as he would register the skin response of a person being tested for lying. Interestingly enough, the plant registered the same increased-stress polygraph response as a human would if his hand had been burned. Even more fascinating, as far as Hal was concerned, was that Backster had burned the leaf of a neighboring plant not connected to the equipment. The original plant, still hooked up to the polygraph, again registered the ‘pain’ response that it had when its own leaves had been burned. This suggested to Hal that the first plant had received this information via some extrasensory mechanism and was demonstrating empathy. It seemed to point to some sort of interconnectedness between living things.1

  The ‘Backster effect’ had also been seen between plants and animals. When brine shrimp in one location died suddenly, this fact seemed to instantly register with plants in another location, as recorded on a standard psychogalvanic response (PGR) instrument. Backster had carried out this type of experiment over several hundred miles and among paramecium, mold cultures and blood samples, and in each instance, some mysterious communication occurred between living things and plants.2 As in Star Wars, each death was registered as a disturbance in The Field.

  Hal’s proposal for the algae experiments happened to be sitting on Backster’s desk the day that he’d been visited by Ingo Swann. Swann, an artist, was mainly known as a gifted psychic, who’d been working on ESP experiments with Gertrude Schmeidler, a professor in psychology at City College in New York.3 Swann had rifled through Hal’s proposal and was intrigued enough to write to him, suggesting that if he were interested in looking at some common ground between the inanimate and the biological that he start doing some experiments in psychic phenomena. Swann himself had done some work on out-of-body experiments and had got good results. Hal was deeply skeptical, but gamely took him up on his suggestion. He contacted Bill Church to see if he could change his study and use some of his grant money to fly Swann out to California for a week.

  A short, chubby man with amiable features, Swann arrived dressed absurdly in a white cowboy hat with white jacket and Levis, like some visiting rock star. Hal grew convinced that he was wasting Bill Church’s money. Two days after Swann arrived, Hal took him down to the basement of the Varian Hall physics building.

  Hal pointed to the magnetometer. He asked Ingo to attempt to alter its magnetic field. Hal explained that any alteration would show up in the output tape.

  Ingo initially was disturbed by the prospect, as he’d never done anything like this before. He said he was first going to psychically peer into the innards of the machinery to get a better sense of how to affect it. As he did, the S-curve suddenly doubled its frequency for about 45 seconds – the length of Ingo’s time of concentration.

  Could he stop the field change on the machine, which is indicated by the S-curve? Hal asked him.

  Ingo closed his eyes and concentrated for 45 seconds. For the same length of time the machine’s output device stopped creating equidistant hills and valleys: the graph traced one long plateau. Ingo said he was letting go; the machine returned to its normal S-curve. He explained that by looking into the machine and concentrating on various parts, he was able to alter what the machine did. As he spoke, the machine again recorded a double frequency and then a double dip – which Ingo said had something to do with his concentrating on the niobium ball inside the machine.

  Hal asked him to stop thinking about it and chatted with him about other subjects for several minutes. The normal S-curve resumed. Now concentrate on the magnetometer, Hal said. The tracing started furiously scribbling. Hal told him to stop thinking about it, and the slow S resumed. Ingo did a quick sketch of what he said he ‘saw’ as the design of the inside of the machine and then asked if they could stop as he was tired. For the next three hours, the machine’s output went back to its regular curves, monotonous and steady.

  A group of graduate students who’d gathered around put the changes down to some strange and coincidental electromagnetic noise creeping into the system. As far as they were concerned, a readily explained blip had occurred. But then Hal had the drawing checked out by Hebard, the post-doctoral student who’d created the machine, and he said it was dead-on accurate.

  Hal didn’t know what to make of it. It appeared that some nonlocal effect had occurred between Ingo Swann and the magnetometer. He went home and wrote a guarded paper on the subject and circulated it to his colleagues, asking them to comment on it. What he’d seen usually went by the name of astral projection or out-of-body experiences, or even clairvoyance, but he would eventually settle on a nice, neutral, non-emotive phrase for it: ‘remote viewing’.

  Hal’s modest experiment launched him on a 13-year project, carried out in parallel with his Zero Point Field work, which sought to determine whether people could see things beyond any known sensory mechanism. Hal realized he’d stumbled on some property of human beings that was not a million miles from what Backster observed – some instant connection with the unseen. Remote viewing seemed of a piece with the notion he’d been toying with about some sort of interconnection between living things. Much later, he would privately speculate about whether remote viewing had anything to do with the Zero Point Field. For the moment, all he was interested in was whether what he’d seen was real and how well
it worked. If Swann could see inside magnetometers, was it possible for him to see anywhere else in the world?

  Inadvertently, Hal also launched America on the largest spy program ever attempted using clairvoyance. A few weeks after he’d circulated his paper, two blue-suited members of the Central Intelligence Agency arrived at his door, waving the report in hand. The agency, they told him, was getting increasingly concerned about the amount of experiments the Russians were conducting into parapsychology funded by the Soviet security forces.4 From the resources they were pouring into it, it seemed as though the Russians were convinced that ESP could unlock all of the West’s secrets. A person who could see and hear things and events separated by time and space represented the perfect spy. The Defense Intelligence Agency had just circulated a report, ‘Controlled offensive behavior – USSR’, which predicted that the Soviets, through their psychic research, would be able to discover the contents of top secret documents, the movements of troops and ships, the location of military installations, the thoughts of generals and colonels. They might even be able to kill or shoot down aircraft from a distance.5 Many senior staff at the CIA thought it was high time that the US looked into it as well; the problem was that they were getting laughed out of most labs. Nobody in the American scientific community would take ESP or clairvoyance seriously. It was the CIA’s view that if they didn’t, the Russians would probably gain an advantage that the US would never be able to overcome. The agency had been scouring around for a small research lab outside academia that might be willing to carry out a small, low-key investigation. SRI – and Hal’s current interest – seemed perfect for the job. Hal even checked out as a good security risk since he’d had experience in intelligence in the Navy and had worked for the National Security Agency.