This one test does not offer definitive evidence that one person’s thoughts affect another person’s body. But the Love Study suggests there may be a concrete, measurable, physical connection between bonded couples.
19
When Radin and Schlitz analyzed the results of all thirty-six couples in their study, they found that when one person “sent” his compassionate intention to his partner, the partner’s physiology mirrored his within two seconds.
20
The correlations were not perfect, but they were powerful. And they did not happen by chance. The odds of getting the results they did by mere chance were 11,000 to 1 for all the bonded couples. And when you looked at the “highly motivated” couples—the ones who were facing cancer, who had something at stake—the odds against chance jumped to 135,000 to 1.
Now, let me be clear. I am not arguing that studies like this one explain reality. These findings could turn out to be a statistical fluke—although there have been some fifty other studies like this one that yielded similar results. I wouldn’t be surprised if in five years, or twenty-five, scientists find wholly materialistic explanations for phenomena such as gut feelings or intuition. But I present the alternative studies here because they offer an explanation—something not pulled out of a magician’s hat but based in quantum physics and tested under rigorous conditions.
“What we’re experiencing here suggests that consciousness or mind or intention is
causal
—not only in our own bodies, but causal in the external world,” Schlitz said.
When you pray for your child, or root for the Dodgers, or curse at your colleague under your breath, that has a measurable effect, she said. “We can’t yet explain it, but this provides a revolutionary break in thinking about how we’re connected, and how we’re separated. I think we are smack dab in the middle of a paradigm shift.”
As she spoke, a wild thought occurred to me. Perhaps quantum physics offers an explanation for prayer and healing. Maybe Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” is at work, in which prayers move from one person to another through Dean Radin’s Jell-O-like reality, that closely woven fabric of reality in which all things are ultimately entangled. For some, that stuff is God, who does not so much intervene in our lives as provide the medium through which prayers move.
I was curious about how Teena explained the results.
“It’s just the real strong power of energy between people who care for each other.”
Finally, I thought. The missing element. My “God I.O,” the scientist’s God, that intelligence that weaves the universe together, unifies everything in a web of consciousness, the God that resides non-locally, outside of time and space—that God had left me a bit cold. It was flesh and bones without life.What was absent was the
pneuma
, the breath of love. Even though scientists on the frontiers of science rarely mention that line on God’s résumé, everyone else who believes there is something more than this puts “love” first on the list.
It occurs to me that experiments like the Love Study are both very small and very large. We are talking about tiny variations in a person’s sweat glands; it doesn’t get much more incremental than that. And yet, perhaps Teena’s fluctuating skin resistance swings the door open to a cosmic idea—that she is somehow connected across time and space to her husband and children, and if she is connected to them, then why not to every particle and person in the universe? That is what quantum entanglement—this Jell-O-like reality—is claiming. The implications are as vast as the heavens.
And while the terminology of “entanglement” and “non-local mind” may be twenty-first-century, the idea dates back to antiquity.
“This is the place where science and spirituality are converging,” Schlitz observed. “You look at the great teachings of Buddhism, Hinduism, Daoism, a lot of the shamanic traditions, even in the Christian traditions, and you see this sense of unity and wholeness. And now what we’re finding is that there is a justification for that sort of philosophical position from an empirical base, from a scientific base.”
While this definition of God does little to fill my soul or feed my emotions—I gain little comfort from imagining myself in the arms of non-local mind, for example—it does go some way toward nourishing my intellect. As I was wrestling with my own concept of God, one that could survive the science I was absorbing, I suffered a small crisis that allowed me to put some of these ideas to a test.
The U.S. Postal Service and the Fabric of Reality
On January 30, 2007, a tiny error set off a chain reaction that threatened nearly a year of research. All year long, a young colleague of mine had been generously transcribing my interviews from various reporting trips, for a pittance. I could not have finished the book without her. Over Christmas, she had taken some minidisks (three-inch-by-three-inch square digital disks) to her family’s home in New England and accidentally left them there. This particular set of minidisks included interviews from four trips (New Mexico, Canada, Florida, and Pennsylvania), which were essential for five different chapters—nearly half the book.
Her mother put the minidisks in a manila envelope and dropped them into a mailbox. On February 2, the envelope arrived in Washington with a large gash in it, minus the minidisks.When I learned this, the earth lurched to a halt, silence roared in my ears, and I was paralyzed by the implications like a mouse before a rattlesnake.
If you live on the East Coast and noticed a decline in your mail delivery service in the first half of February 2007, you can direct your ire at me. During that time, I enlisted the help of every U.S. Postal Service customer-relations officer between New Hampshire and Washington, D.C. By seven o’clock each morning I had methodically called the managers of mail distribution centers up and down the coast. I e-mailed them digital pictures of the minidisks. I called individual post offices, and enjoyed several conversations with the investigative arm of the U.S. Postal Service. By the end of the third day, the Postal Service officer who was in charge of my case remarked, “Ms. Hagerty, we have thirty people working to find your minidisks.” I did not mention to her the dozen or so other federal employees I had called on my own.
I also took a step I had not considered in a decade. Christian Scientists, I have noticed, are strangely adept at finding lost things, possibly because they focus on God as “infinite Mind,” the all-knowing and all-seeing. I called a Christian Science “practitioner” to pray for me.
“Hello, darling,” she greeted me, with a warmth that almost reduced me to a puddle of tears. “How can I help?”
I explained the situation and then heard the familiar, steely resolve of a Christian Scientist in action. There followed a brief conversation, in which she made a series of declarative statements. Among them: “Nothing that belongs to you can be separated from you. Feel your oneness with the Source of intelligence.” And: “You think
you
have covered a lot of ground in searching for this? God has already covered all the ground there is. Nothing passes His notice.” And: “It’s like the law of mathematics. It is always operating, and everyone is responding to this law. It’s like gravity. You don’t have to understand it but you obey it. Everyone is responding to this law of order, including the mailmen, the mail processors, the person on the street—everyone is under God’s law of order.”
You get the idea. At base, of course, this is not so far from the idea of non-local mind suggested by quantum physics—namely, that everything is connected in a fabric of intelligence, and we have access to this larger “mind” that is not limited by time or space.
The days stretched on and my disks made no appearance. Every moment that passed shaved down the chances of finding the minidisks before they were sent to a warehouse in Atlanta (the size of two football fields), or, more likely, thrown out as trash. But I stubbornly clung to this image of an intelligence that keeps an eye on everything; I had hit the “search” function and was now waiting for the results.
Nearly three weeks after the minidisks disappeared into a black hole at the U.S. Postal Service, I received a call from Dennis Panich, the manager of one of the distribution centers in Washington, D.C.
“I’ve got good news,” he said. “One of my guys found your tapes.”
I was struck dumb.
“Where were they?” I finally asked.
“They were in the bottom of a large orange container, along with a few other things.” He laughed. “You know, I wrote a book myself, and I know how much work goes into it. So every day I showed my folks the photo of the minidisks and told them we were going to find those tapes. And we did.”
When I visited the Institute of Noetic Sciences about a month later, I related my story to Dean Radin. Radin does not believe in a traditional God, but he does believe we can access information by tapping into a larger, non-local mind. I asked him to explain the happy outcome from his perspective. I waited for the low, appreciative whistle of amazement that would make such a lovely scene in my book. No whistle came.
“Your story is mind-boggling in one way,” Radin observed,“but I’m a little blasé about it now because I’ve seen it happen so many times.”
I was both miffed and intrigued. How did the recovery work, according to his theory of entanglement? Remember, entanglement suggests that reality is like a fabric in which everything is woven together. Or, to continue with the Jell-O analogy: if you touch one side, the other side jiggles.
“Things appear to be separate,” Radin said, “but with the right way of focusing your attention, they’re not so separate. My suspicion is that you sort of imagined in your mind’s eye that the universe is connected, and there was one piece of the universe—where the tapes were—that you
really needed.
And you created a network of attention, a lot of people’s attention dedicated to finding this particular thing. There was an army of people out there who wanted to please you, they wanted to find those tapes, and so it’s almost as if a momentary network was created that had a little bit higher valence to it, it shined a little bit brighter for you and all the other people, and this
group
attention became focused on finding the thing which is there.”
Radin paused.“Everything is there,” he said.“Nothing can be lost in a holistic medium.”
I nodded, thinking silently that this “holistic medium” sounded an awful lot like “God.”
My experience with the minidisks
proves
nothing, of course. To those who believe in miracles, God intervened to return my precious items. To those who think of the universe as a fabric of reality in which all is connected by a vast intelligence, I had tapped into information that was waiting for me all along. And to many others, I had caught a lucky break, nothing more. But let’s be clear: Which way you view the universe and “God” is a matter of choice, not hard evidence. Hard science does not mean petrified science. And in this moment, science may be in the middle of a paradigm shift.
CHAPTER 12
Paradigm Shifts
THE MORNING OF JUNE 15, 2005, arrived way too early. For two weeks, my friends and I had been thinking hard all day and bantering long into the wee hours in pubs around Cambridge University—a gru eling regimen for a forty-something crowd. But nothing could delay us from the morning’s event, and so we marched from our hotel, past the famed Mathematical Bridge, to the Divinity School. Once inside the sleek building, we sat down at a long table of expensive blond wood and waited eagerly.We were anticipating the Fight of the Century.
It was a pointy-headed fight, to be sure, but we were a pointy-headed crowd: ten seasoned journalists
1
invited by the Templeton Foundation and Cambridge University to observe as celebrities in the world of science unspooled their ideas about biology, string theory, and multiverses. What tagged these presentations as unusual was the question underlying them: Could God retain a place in the intelligent man’s world? Or, in this scientific age: Had God been reduced to a superstitious belief lacking any rational basis?
After eight days of lectures—and our polite but lethal grilling of the scientists—it seemed to me that God was losing.While many of the scientists claimed some sort of faith, generally Christian, they kept their spiritual beliefs in a sealed container where they would not contaminate the “real” work of understanding human consciousness and the universe we live in. I was witnessing a blitzkrieg of scientific materialism overrunning the quaint but untestable claims of God.
This irked me, especially when I realized that God could not win under the rules of twenty-first-century science. This was not Ali versus Frazier. This was the World Wrestling Federation. The decks were stacked, the outcome certain, the smack-down inevitable. The rules of this game—the paradigm of modern science—revolve around certain core beliefs. One of them dictates that scientists can study only what they can measure: the physical world and observable behavior. Try to investigate something that cannot be precisely measured—such as a spiritual experience that transforms a person’s life—well, that’s cause for immediate disqualification.
Another rule is the mind-brain paradigm: everything we are, see, feel, do, or think is a physical state, the electrical and chemical activity in three pounds of tissue called the brain. Mind, consciousness—forget about the
soul
—must be reduced to matter. It is a closed loop, excluding any notion of God or a spiritual realm.
But on that rainy morning in Cambridge I witnessed something extraordinary, akin to Dorothy spotting the little bald man pulling the levers of the Wizard of Oz. For only a moment, the curtain pulled back and we saw the fight for what it was: two
belief systems
duking it out.
John Barrow, a brilliant Cambridge mathematician, was speed-walking us through the hypothesis of a “fine-tuned” universe that is exquisitely and astonishingly calibrated to allow for life. He explained the concept of “multiverses,” which posits that we live in one of 10,500 universes. Then he said, almost as an aside, “I’m quite happy with a traditional theistic view of the universe.”