The Field (35 page)

In his other study of primetime TV, Radin had assumed that both the machines and human observers would peak in the key moments of any show and dribble off at the end, when commercials are usually shown. This is exactly what happened. Although the effect size wasn’t enormous, the machine’s greater tendency to order peaked just when the audience would have been most involved in the TV shows.

Wagnerians are a fanatical bunch, thought Dieter Vaitl, a colleague of Roger Nelson’s, at the Department of Clinical and Physiological Psychology at the University of Giessen. Over the years, the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, the opera house Wagner had built for himself, had become something of a sacred site to which Wagner aficionados make an annual pilgrimage for the Wagner festival. These were true Wagner fanatics, intimate with every note, every waxing and waning of emotion, happy to sit through 15 hours of the
Ring
cycle. Festspielhaus attendees, in the main, were Wagnerian experts. This, in short, represented the perfect audience for a FieldREG trial.

In 1996, Vaitl, who was very Wagnerian himself, with his sleek pompadour of white hair and his proud demeanor, attended the festival with a FieldREG machine at his side, recording the first cycle of the various operas. He repeated his experiment the following year and the year after that. In total, the REG machine sat through countless hours of Wagner – nine operas, from
Tristan und Isolde
to
Götterdämmerung
. As a whole, over the three years, the trends were consistent, showing an overall change in order in the machine during the most highly emotional scenes or those with the most poignant music, such as choir parts.
¹²

In this instance, the PEAR lab couldn’t match Vaitl’s results. They’d also had a FieldREG machine attend a wide variety of operas and shows in New York City, but the results showed the machines did not react to a significant degree.
¹³
Obviously, audience attention required a Wagnerian type of intensity to have any affect on the machine. Vaitl concluded that a resonance might be more likely to be created when the audience knows the music well and is tuned into it.

An even more interesting result had come from Radin’s other close associate, Professor Dick Bierman in Amsterdam, who had often attempted to replicate his studies. Bierman decided to try out the FieldREG in a home reporting poltergeist-type effects – strange movements or displacement of large objects, usually thought to be caused by ghosts (hence the name, poltergeist, which means ‘noisy ghosts’). In some quarters, poltergeists are not believed to be anything more than an intense energy emanating from an individual, often a tempestuous adolescent. In this instance, Bierman installed a REG machine and compared times the family reported a poltergeist effect and the heads-and-tails random output generated by the machine. The same moments the house reported an object flying around, the machine also demonstrated a deviation from chance.
¹⁴
It may be that an individual with that type of intensity is creating the poltergeist experience through intense quantum effects in The Field.

Legend has it that the sun always shines on the heads of Princeton alumni, not simply through life but on the day they actually graduate. The local folklore was that even when rain was forecast, it somehow held off until after the commencement exercise was finished. Roger Nelson enjoyed attending the graduation day with his wife every year and had on more than one occasion remarked on the good weather. He now began to wonder whether this was more than simple coincidence. The FieldREG studies had left him with questions about how this type of field consciousness might operate in real life. It occurred to him that the collective wishing of the entire university community for a sunny day might actually have an effect in chasing rain clouds away.

He gathered together all weather reports for the past thirty years and examined what the weather had been like before, during and after the Princeton graduation. Mainly he was looking for the daily rate of precipitation. He also examined the weather of the six towns surrounding Princeton, which were to act as controls.

Nelson’s analysis showed some strange effects, as though some collective umbrella surrounded Princeton just on the day its students graduated. In the thirty years, 72 per cent (or nearly three-quarters) of graduation days had been dry, compared with only two-thirds (67 per cent) of days in the surrounding towns. In statistical terms, this meant that Princeton had some magical dry effect around graduation time and was drier than usual, whereas all the surrounding towns were as wet as they should be around that time of year. Even on the one day when there’d been a flood of 2.6 inches of rain in Princeton, curiously the rain had held off until the ceremony had finished.
¹⁵

Nelson’s study of the weather in Princeton was only a tiny gauge of whether people could produce a positive effect on their environment. For twenty years, the Transcendental Meditation organization had systematically tested, through dozens and dozens of studies, whether group meditation could reduce violence and discord in the world. It was the contention of the founder of Transcendental Meditation, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, that individual stress led to world stress and that group calm led to world calm. He’d postulated that if 1 per cent of an area had people practising TM, or the square root of 1 per cent of the population were practising TM-Sidhi, a more advanced and active type of meditation, conflict of any variety – rates of shootings and other crime, drug abuse, even traffic accidents – would go down. The idea of the ‘Maharishi’ effect was that regularly practicing TM enables you to get in touch with a fundamental field that connects all things – a concept not unlike the Zero Point Field. If enough people were doing it, the coherence would prove infectious among the entire population.

The TM organization had elected to call this ‘Super Radiance’ because just as superradiance in the brain or in a laser creates coherence and unity, so meditation would have the same effect on society. Special groups of yogic flyers have assembled all over the world, carrying out special ‘meditation intensives’ targeted at specific areas of conflict. Since 1979 a US Super Radiance group ranging in size from a few hundred to more than 8000 has gathered twice a day at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa, to attempt to create greater harmony in the world.

Although the TM organization has been ridiculed, largely because of the promotion of the Mararishi’s own personal interests, the sheer weight of data is compelling. Many of the studies have been published in impressive journals, such as the
Journal of Conflict Resolution
, the
Journal of Mind and Behavior
, and
Social Indicators Research
, which means that they would have had to meet stringent reviewing procedures. A recent study, the National Demonstration Project in Washington DC, conducted over two months in 1993, showed that when the local Super Radiance group increased to 4000, violent crime, which had been steadily increasing during the first five months of the year, began to fall, to 24 per cent, and continued to drop until the end of the experiment. As soon as the group disbanded, the crime rate rose again. The study demonstrated that the effect couldn’t have been due to such variables as weather, the police or any special anti-crime campaign.
¹⁶

Another study of twenty-four US cities showed that whenever a city reached a point where 1 per cent of the population was carrying out regular TM, the crime rate dropped to 24 per cent. In a follow-up study of 48 cities, half of which had a 1 per cent population which meditated, the 1 per cent cities achieved a 22 per cent decrease in crime, compared with an increase of 2 per cent in the control cities, and an 89 per cent reduction in the crime trend, compared with an increase of 53 per cent in the control cities.
¹⁷

The TM organization has even studied whether group meditation could affect world peace. In one 1983 study of a special TM assembly in Israel, which tracked the Arab-Israeli conflict day by day for two months, on days when the number of meditators was high, war deaths in Lebanon fell by 76 per cent, and local crime, traffic accidents and fires all decreased. Once again, confounding influences such as weather, weekends or holidays had been controlled for.
¹⁸

The TM studies, as well as Nelson’s FieldREG work, in their own small, preliminary way, offered hope to an alienated and Godless generation. Good might well be able to conquer evil after all. We could create a better community. We had the collective capacity to make the world a better place.

Radin was being a bit facetious when he came up with the idea. He and Nelson had been at Freiburg at a conference in late 1997, and the talk had been about whether they ought to bring some physiological measurements like EEG into studies using REGs. ‘Why not look at Gaia’s EEG?’ Radin remarked at one point.

Nelson immediately pounced on it. As an EEG reads the activity of an individual brain, by attaching electrodes over its surface, so they might be able to take readings of the mind of Gaia, as many people liked to refer to the world. James Lovelock had coined the name, after the Greek goddess of the earth, with his hypothesis that the world is a living entity with its own consciousness.
¹⁹
Perhaps they could set up a network of REGs dotted all over the world. The world EEG would be run continuously, taking a constant temperature of the state of the collective mind. When they were searching for a name for it, another colleague of Nelson’s came up with ‘ElectroGaiaGram’, or EGG. Nelson liked the term ‘noosphere’, coined by Teilhard de Chardin to reflect the idea that the earth was encased in a layer of intelligence. Although Nelson would develop this idea into the Global Consciousness Project, a project at Princeton but separate from PEAR, EGG was the name that stuck.

If it was true that fields generated by individual consciousnesses can combine during moments of like-mindedness, Nelson wished to see if the collective reaction to the most stirring events of our time would have some sort of common effect on highly sensitive gauges such as REG machines. The O.J. Simpson trial had been a first attempt at this, running machines in different places and comparing the results.

Nelson began with a small group of scientists, who turned on their REG machines in August 1998. He eventually gathered together a network of forty scientists running REGs all over the globe. The project generated a tidal wave of data. Continuous streams of data pouring out of them were sent over the Internet, to be matched with dramatic moments in modern history – the death of John F. Kennedy Jr, and the near impeachment of Bill Clinton; the Paris crash of
Concorde
and the bombing of Yugoslavia; floodings and volcanic eruptions and the New Year’s celebrations of Y2K.

Even before EGG started it had its first real test in prototype form, when the world’s most beloved princess was suddenly killed in a Paris tunnel. Data recorded before, during and after the Princess of Wales’ funeral was compiled and compared with the official schedules of events. During all the public ceremonies for Diana, the machines had veered off their random course, an effect that was 100 to 1 against chance.
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However, when Nelson looked at similar data taken during the funeral of Mother Theresa soon after, there had been no untoward effect on the machines. Mother Theresa had been ill and her death had been expected. She was elderly and had lived a full and productive life. Clearly, the tragedy of the young and troubled princess captured the heart of the world, and the REGs had picked it up.
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American elections and even the Monica Lewinsky scandal didn’t seem to stir the world. But New Year’s celebrations, major disasters and tragedies sent a shiver through the collective spine that duly showed up on the machines. Not surprisingly, one of the most profound effects was felt during and immediately after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
²²

These initial results left Nelson and Radin with many tantalizing questions. If there was such a thing as a world mind, perhaps little flashes of inspiration in it could account for the most monstrous and magnificent moments in human history, or maybe negative consciousness was also like a germ that could infect people and take hold. Germany had been depressed in every sense after the First World War. Could this dispiritedness have affected the Germans on a quantum level, making it easier for Hitler, that most intoxicating of speakers, to create a kind of negative collective, which fed on itself and condoned the grossest of evils? Had a collective consciousness been responsible for the Spanish inquisition? The Salem witchcraft trials? Did collective evil also create coherence?

And what of man’s greatest achievements? Could a sudden gust of inspiration occur in the world mind? Could some coalescence of energy be responsible for the flowering of art or higher consciousness in a certain age? For the ancient Greeks? The Renaissance? Was creativity also infectious, accounting for the explosive creativity in Vienna in the 1790s and the burgeoning of British pop music in the 1960s? The Zero Point Field provided a likely explanation for certain unexplained physical synchronicities – such as the scientifically verified coming together of menstrual cycles among women in close proximity.
²³
Could it also account for emotional and intellectual synchronicity in the world?