Maitreya School and Healing Centre

More ...

Investigating the Impact of Focussed Intention in Groups

This article summarises the series of experiments organised by Lynne McTaggart to investigative the success of the focussed intention of groups to produce measureable changes in specific areas away from the group.

Absent Healing is an example of this kind of applied intention.

Lynne McTaggart and The Intention Experiment

Lynne McTaggart is an investigative journalist, author and co-founder and editor of the health magazine, What Doctors Don't Tell You.

Lynne created the Intention Experiment project to investigate the effect of "healing" through applied intention in large groups and determine their success using scientifically acceptable procedures.

Lynne wanted to investigate the limits of what could be achieved, like:

  • are certain conditions and preparatory states of mind more conducive to success than others?
  • how much power can a thought/intention have - whether for good or ill?
  • can the combined efforts of many people with the same intention produce a disproportionate increase in its success?

The project consisted of a set of experiments, where each experiment was devised with the assistance of scientists to validate the procedure, analyse the results and draw conclusions from them. Each had an objective (the intention) which could be described simply and precisely, whether it was "to decrease the bio-photons emitted from samples of Acetabularia (an algae)" or "to reduce the incidence of violence in the streets of a district of St Louis (USA) over a specified period".

The participants had previously registered for the experiment on Lynne's website. At the start time, the intention would be displayed and Lynne would read it aloud on her website and the participants would focus on the intention for specified periods of time. The number of participants varied from 16 to up to 7000, and they came from all over the world.

Nearly all the experiments were successful in achieving the desired intention and the ones that weren't failed due to technical issues like internet connection problems or contamination of the "target" samples in a laboratory.

Lynne McTaggart's website is www.lynnemctaggart.com. This project is described in her 2007 book, "The Intention Experiment".