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The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World
by Lynne McTaggart
Lynne McTaggart, is a best selling author and an award winning, science journalist. With The Intention Experiment, she follows up on the scientific evidence she amassed in her preceeding book, The Field. In that book she suggested something remarkable about our potential to affect reality, but also left many unanswered questions about how impactful thought could really be. She tries to address some of those unanswered questions in The Intention Experiment and suggests that we are connected to everyone and everything and that our thoughts, intentions and actions can have an impact on more than just ourselves.
The book is presented in four parts. The first part follows quantum physics research and anomalies that surfaced in the studies of atoms and quantum entanglement. It also recaps studies of the human energy field and the effects of directed consciousness, or what scientists now call the study of intention. The research she cites occurred at Princeton, MIT, Stanford and many other prestigious universities and laboratories. McTaggart hops back and forth to different scientists and their studies to show how they propelled each other forward as each study raised new questions. The flow from study to study is cohesive and orderly and wrestles with which mental disciplines ensure results from focused intention on quantifiable targets – animal, plant, and human.
The second part focuses on the physiological impact of focused intention. McTaggart shares studies that try to determine whether or not training and experience change the physiology of the brain and which mental disciplines ensure that a healer will enter a state that enables him to repair another person’s body. This section also speculates on whether or not practice can lead individuals to be better intention transmitters and what the steps are to achieving concentrated focus.
In part three, McTaggart does research on how to “master” intention. In this section she stepped out of the laboratory a bit and secured data from people and groups that were successfully using intention in their lives. Many of her subjects came from the sports arenas. She talks about how athletes engage all of their senses in their rehearsals for their athletic trials and wanders through the research and new theories about mental rehearsal — it’s efficacy and whether it is transferable to other activities. This area of research pointed her toward an interesting scientific conundrum: whether the brain differentiates between a thought and an action; and whether or not the thought of an action creates the same pattern in neurotransmission as the action itself. In this section McTaggart also touches on the impact of bad thoughts or negative intentions. This is also where her intention experiment begins.
The last part of the book offers a practical program to get in touch with your own thoughts to increase the activity and strength of your intentions in order to affect real change in your life.
The book ends with an invitation to join a global intention experiment.
In writing this book, McTaggart doesn’t merely offer up an incredible amount of detailed research findings, she also translates the implications of these findings for everyday folks. She provides a simple model to follow for personal experimentation and manifestation. Read at your own risk if you do not want to have to think about how your thoughts impact humanity.