The Intention Experiment

Lynne McTaggart

What’s the Big Idea?

Everything is interconnected in a vast, mysterious force field  and every
thought  is “tangible energy,
with the power to transform”. Hence we can change the world just by thinking.

Recently this idea has become known,  rather grandly,  as “cosmic ordering”, but
you probably know it as “positive thinking” or
”mind-over-matter”. There are countless books about it but this one
is more ambitious than most  because it claims to  present a “coherent scientific
theory” to  explain it.

This is brave. Consciousness is  known, famously, as the
“hard problem” because so far it has defied the understanding of
even our greatest minds.  McTaggart ,
however, seems to think she has cracked it. Consciousness is “coherent
information” or “ ordered energy”
– a force that  both  creates reality and has measurable  effects on the material world. In
support of her theory she claims  “ a sizeable body of
research…shows that thoughts are capable of affecting everything from the
simplest machines to the most complex living beings.  “

What she
doesn’t say is that an even more sizeable body of research suggests that
there is simply nothing to all these claims. When I was researching  my own book about consciousness
(“Consciousness” Weidenfield and Nicolson 2002) I spent months trying to get to the bottom
of this  contradiction but it proved
impossible. I agree with McTaggart that something
very strange is going on, but the evidence doesn’t prove that it is  what she
thinks it is.

So what’s new?

Much of this book is a reiteration of McTaggart’s
earlier book “The Field” .  One novelty, though, is that it invites
readers to take part in a web-based  experiment  which the author describes as “the
largest mind-over-matter experiment in history” .  It involves  logging on to a website where you
are given a precise date and time. When it arrives you stop whatever else you
are doing and concentrate for a few moments on altering some event –
lowering the temperature in a distant laboratory, for example. The idea is that
getting lots of people to beam out the same thought at the same time
strengthens its effects.

Similar studies have been carried out for decades, but
another one is
welcome because
research of this kind is rarely
supported by established institutions and tends not to attract the
grants which more orthodox studies rely on. Anything that helps gather data
about the effects – or non-effects -  of conscious thought is therefore
to be encouraged.

How Reader-Friendly is it?

There’s a lot of quasi-scientific terminology and
heavy-duty talk
about quantum physics but McTaggart is
good at explaining complicated phenomena in a clear and lively way. The danger
is that her eloquent style will seduce naïve readers into uncritical
acceptance of her conclusions.

Boffin Rating.

“Straight” boffins will dismiss this book as New
Age twaddle but wise ones will keep their mouths shut and their minds open  (though not
so open that their brains fall out.)

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