The Field (24 page)

Could it be that this communication is like any ordinary form of communication, but the noise of our everyday lives stops us hearing it? Braud realized that if he could create a state of sensory deprivation in a person, his mind might more readily notice the subtle effects not perceived by the ordinary chattering brain. Would perception improve if you deprived it of ordinary stimuli? Would this allow you access to The Field?

This was precisely the theory of Mahareshi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation. Several studies carried out by the Moscow Brain Research Institute’s Laboratory of Neurocybernetics examining the effect of TM on the brain show an increase in areas of the cortex taking part in the perception of information and also an increase in the functioning relationship of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. The studies would suggest that meditation opens the doors of perception a little wider.
²⁰

Braud had heard about the
ganzfeld
, which is German for ‘whole field’, a method of cutting out sensory input, and he began conducting ESP studies using a classic
ganzfeld
protocol. His volunteers would sit in a comfortable reclining chair in a soundproof room with soft lighting. Half spheres like halved ping-pong balls would be placed over their eyes and they would wear headphones, which played continuous, quiet static. Braud told the volunteers to speak for twenty minutes about any impressions that popped into their heads.

Thereafter, the study would follow the usual design of a telepathy experiment. Braud’s hunch proved correct. The
ganzfeld
experiments were among the most successful of all.

When Braud’s own studies were combined with twenty-seven others, twenty-three, or 82 per cent, were found to have success rates higher than chance. The median effect size was 0.32 – not dissimilar to PEAR’s REG effect size.
²¹

Important shifts in thinking often occur in interesting synchronicities. Charles Honorton of the Maimonides clinic in Brooklyn and Adrian Parker, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, had been wondering exactly the same thing as Braud and also began looking into the
ganzfeld
as a means of exploring the nature of human consciousness. The combined meta-analysis of all
ganzfeld
experiments produced a result with odds against chance of ten billion to one.
²²

Braud even experienced some premonitions when using the
ganzfeld
on himself. One evening, sitting on the floor of the living-room in his apartment in Houston, the half ping-pong balls and headphones in place, he suddenly experienced an intense and vivid vision of a motorcycle, with bright headlights and wet streets.

Soon after he’d finished his session, his wife returned home. At the very point he’d had his vision, she told him, she’d nearly collided with a motorcycle. There had been bright headlights shining at her and the streets were drenched with rain.
²³

Thoughts about the significance of his work percolated up in Braud’s mind to a disquieting realization. If we could intend good things to happen to other people, we might also be able to make bad things happen.
²⁴
There’d been many anecdotal stories of voodoo effects, and it made perfect sense, given the experimental results he’d been getting, that bad intentions could have an effect. Was it possible to protect yourself from them?

Some preliminary work of Braud’s reassured him. One of his studies showed that it was possible for you to block or prevent any influences you didn’t want.
²⁵
This was possible through psychological ‘shielding strategies’. You could visualize a safe or protective shield, or barrier or screen, which would prevent penetration of the influence.
²⁶
In this experiment, participants were told to attempt to ‘shield’ themselves against the influence of two experimenters, who attempted to raise their EDA levels. The same was tried on another group, but they were told not to try to block any remote influence. Those doing the influencing weren’t aware of who was blocking their attempts and who wasn’t. At the end of the experiment, the shielded group showed far fewer physical effects than those who just allowed themselves to be affected.
²⁷

All the early ESP work had created a model of a mental radio, where one subject was sending thoughts to someone else. Braud now believed that the truth was far more complex. It appeared that the mental and physical structures of the sender’s consciousness are able to exert an ordering influence on the less-organized recipient. Another possibility was that it was all there all the time, in some type of field, like the Zero Point Field, which could be tapped into and mobilized when necessary. This was the view of David Bohm, who’d postulated that all information was present in some invisible domain, or higher reality (the implicate order), but active information could be called up, like a fire brigade, at time of need, when it would be necessary and meaningful.
²⁸
Braud suspected the answer might be a mixture of the latter two – a field of all information and an ability of human beings to provide information which would help to better order other people and things. In ordinary perception, the capacity of the dendritic networks in our brains to receive information from the Zero Point Field is strictly limited, as Pribram demonstrated. We are tuned in to only a limited range of frequencies. However, any state of altered consciousness – meditation, relaxation, the
ganzfeld
, dreams – relaxes this constraint. According to systems theorist Ervin Laszlo, it is as though we are a radio and our ‘bandwidth’ expands.
²⁹
The receptive patches in our brains become more receptive to a larger number of wavelengths in the Zero Point Field.

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

D
OWN 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.