Timothy Schultz:

I am so excited to be joined here right now with Lynne McTaggart. She is an award-winning journalist and an internationally bestselling author of The Field, The Intention Experiment, The Power of Eight, and several other books including The God Notes, which is coming out soon, but Lynne, how are you doing today?

Lynne McTaggart:

I am just great.

Timothy Schultz:

It's great to be here with you. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really, really appreciate it. I'm very much looking forward to this. For people who are watching or listening today who might not yet be familiar with you and your work, you're known for running what is called intention experiments. What are these exactly? How do they work? What does the evidence actually show?

Lynne McTaggart:

Timothy Schultz:

Oh my gosh, that is quite remarkable. So how many people typically participate in one of these intention experiments? And more importantly, how does it really work? I mean, and how are, like, how does this happen, do you think?

Lynne McTaggart:

That's a $64,000 question, how come intention works? Well, how it works in terms of the experiment is very simple. I gather together my readers around the world or I, and in the case of Washington DC, we had an audience of 300 at the Gaia Sphere, Gaia's headquarters, but we also had about 10,000 people participating on live stream. Now we have had anything from 25,000 people to an audience of a hundred taking part in intention experiments. So what we found is size doesn't matter. I'll give you an example of this. Not only size, but distance doesn't matter. I ran an experiment in Sydney, Australia. And this was the first of a batch of experiments we did trying to make seeds grow faster. I was working with the University of Arizona, the noted psychologist, Dr. Gary Schwartz, who set up a very well-controlled experiment with four sets of target seeds, labeled ABCD. When I got to Sydney, I had an audience of about 700. I had them choose one of the sets of seeds. We didn't tell the scientists. We did our intention. Let's say it was group A. We told the scientists we were done, still didn't tell them which ones. That was their cue to plant the seeds. And then they were to measure them five days later. When they finished measuring, I unblinded the study, and lo and behold, the seed with that intention grew significantly higher than controls. Now, we ran that five more times in different locations with different size audiences from New York and South Carolina to Dallas, Texas, LA, and then over the internet with my audience around the world. Every single time, the seeds with intention grew significantly higher than the three controls. And now, let's just think about this for a minute. So, I'm in Sydney, Australia. The scientists had sent me photos of the seeds, so we were sending intention not to the thing itself, but a photograph of the thing, a symbolic representation of the things itself. We were also 8,000 miles away from the target, which was in Tucson, Arizona, those seeds. So... I started realizing that when we do intention, we create a psychic internet of sorts that connects us with the target of our thoughts. And as I said, size didn't matter. Now all we ever do with intention experiments is hold the intention for 10 minutes. So it's not hours of prayer or hours of meditation. It's a very focused thought and is just for 10 minutes, and it's worked every time.

Timothy Schultz:

So you put the energy towards that? Like how do you think... If if I were to participate or someone that's listening or watching this right now, and we were going to participate in an intention experiment, how do you put out the intention effectively?

Lynne McTaggart:

Well, I teach that in a big, big course called the Intention Masterclass. But I'll give you one hint, which is, it's really important to be specific. A lot of people think, oh, I can't be too specific because it will limit what I'm intending for. Nothing could be further from the truth. As I mentioned earlier, we've run intention experiments, and four didn't work. A few of them were technical problems, but one of them, one or two of them were that we weren't specific enough. When we just sent love to water, we didn't have an effect. When we sent an intention to shift it more alkaline by one full pH, we had an effect, so what we've found, and I've found this with working with thousands of students, that when on teaching intention, that they have to be specific, and the more specific, the more likely they are to achieve success. So we're highly specific. We indicate with that seed experiment, we indicated that it needs to be at least a certain amount of centimeters by the fifth day of growing kind of thing. We're always highly specific.

Timothy Schultz:

I don't know from your research if you would even put this in the same category, but how does it compare to like prayer or meditation? In addition to that, with one person intending something versus a group of people, how do you compare those two scenarios?

Lynne McTaggart:

Sure, good question. Well, first of all, it's nothing like either prayer or meditation. Prayer essentially is a supplication. It's sort of saying, God, you decide, thy will be done. With intention it's a very focused thought. It's a very respectful, but very specific request to the universe. And it's non- it's not and it's secular it's non-denominational essentially, which is nice because when people are not religious believers they can still take part. Now what happens with groups is it seems to supersize the intentions and there's a lot of things that happen. But before I get into that, I want to also say that it is completely not meditation and we know this because I did a study with a team of neuroscientists at Life University, one of the largest and most prestigious chiropractic universities in the world. They were interested in my smaller groups, Power of Eight groups. So we did a studied where we put an EEG cap on one member of each of the group and then we had them do an intention for a member of the groups with pain or with sort of physical issue. And what we found was very quickly, and this surprised us because we thought we were going to see brainwave signatures almost identical to those in meditation, and they were completely different. We found that very quickly the parts of the brain involved in feeling, making us feel separate. The parietal lobes which sit back here, they help us navigate through space, they tell us this is me, this is not me. They were dialed way down. So were the parts of the brain, the right frontal lobes, involved with worry, doubt, negativity. They were also dialed down. Now in meditation, certain. Brain waves are increased, alpha waves, slower brain waves that are slower than those of ordinary waking consciousness. Ours, everything was turning down. So our brainwaves looked nothing like those of meditation, to our surprise. What they did look like was almost identical to the work of Dr. Andrew Newberg, a famous neuroscientist then at the University of Pennsylvania who did studies of Sufi masters during chanting and Buddhist monks during ecstatic prayer. So our people were in this study. We're in a state of ecstatic oneness. They turned off the parts that make us feel separate. They were connected. They experienced what many people talk about, essentially a mystical state. And here's the most interesting thing about it. To become a Sufi master, it takes years of practice. To become a Buddhist monk in ecstatic prayer, it usually takes a long time of priming. And yet our people were total novices. These were all students who hadn't even meditated before. Nevertheless, within a minute or two, they entered into that altered state of oneness. So. What I realized from that was, particularly with small groups, power of eight groups, but also intention experiments, where you have groups of thousands, it is essentially a fast track to the miraculous because you enter an altered state. You enter a state of oneness. And we don't get to feel that in our ordinary life. You know, we all talk about, hey, we're all one. But we don't experience life like that. We experience life in a kind of desolate separation, feeling of being lonely people on a lonely planet in a lonely universe. But during these power of eight groups, during these intention experiments, you do get to experience that extraordinary state. And I believe that's the state of transformation.

Timothy Schultz:

So this state of oneness, what do you believe from your research is actually happening?

Lynne McTaggart:

Timothy Schultz:

Wow, that is extraordinary. It's very extraordinary. A lot of people watching or listening this particular show, in addition to everything we're talking about, are interested in success and luck or what we see in the material world. Am I understanding correctly that altruism and helping other people is one powerful way to help bring that about?

Lynne McTaggart:

Timothy Schultz:

Well, you have a master class coming up in the end of, or in February. And so that is, I mean, it sounds like one opportunity, but is that correct? What is the master class that's coming up and where can people find you?

Lynne McTaggart:

Okay, thank you for asking. So my master class is my signature course. I have many others, but this one is the big year-long course and what makes it different is that I work with you live. So I'm working with you in live and in interactive session. So you join me for the first six weeks on zoom every Saturday for two hours and I teach different aspects of how to be, how to really master intention. They're more advanced than the beginning classes. It's good for people who have studied this kind of area for a while and also are, you know who really want to dive into it with groups. So after the six weeks of intention boot camp, I then put you in groups. And we organize it for you in a friendly time zone, and according to your preferred meeting times. So our team organize all of that. And then my assignment is, OK, you meet once a week for an hour. And you do intentions for each other. And I give you loads and loads of instructions about how to do it and how to it effectively. And then I... meet with you through the year periodically to help mentor, to hone your skills, to give you personalized coaching, and so forth. And I also send a bunch of things to you that are things to try, ways to improve, etc. So it's, we work together through the year. And people can find out about it by coming, going to my website LynnMcTaggart.com. And there's information about the master class on the front page, and you can also find it under courses.

Timothy Schultz:

Beautiful and we will put a link to that in the description if you're watching this on YouTube or in the show notes if you're listening to this today. And Lynne, this is so fascinating. I have questions that could literally go on for hours, but I know our time is limited and I respect your time But I can't let you go without asking you this. Some people, a lot of people in fact that are watching or listening to this show are really into, and I know you mentioned one aspect of a master class is to, or one thing that someone can do is increase their intuition, if I was hearing you correctly. So, how does intuition relate to what you study and what you're doing with intention?

Lynne McTaggart:

Well, what's really important with intention is to turn off the logical mind, and what I teach people to do is just that. When we're trying to be intuitive, and I'm trying to teach people how to be intuitive about other people, you have to realize that the evidence shows we know what other people are thinking only about 20% of the time, and not very much more. Even with a loved one, even with our partner, we don't know what they're thinking. So I want to teach people how to find out more about what people are thinking, so they can improve their relationships with them. One of the keys is to turn off that logical analytical mind. And so I explain to people that scientists show that our brain operates in in different ways. So if we saw a bear over there running toward us, or something we thought was a bear. It's a shadow. We think, oh God, it's a bear! That thought is in our amygdala, the more primitive part of the emotional brain. And we go, eek! And that immediate hit is really important because if it were a bear, we could hightail it before it ate us. Now, it takes about 11 seconds to then travel to the front of the brain. Which is the logical mind or the logical part of the brain. And then in those 11 seconds, it will clarify it and say, no, no. It was just the wind rustling. It's not a bear at all. But it was very good that we got that initial information because we could, as I say, get out of there. If we waited 11 seconds we would be somebody's breakfast by then. So I teach people how to turn off that logical mind, and to just bring in sense impressions that give people more information. And I show them how to do that. I show how to increase that intuitive part of the brain with a variety of exercises, including... Staying curious, staying awake, essentially, staying, noticing more without judgment. So there's a lot of techniques we do in that particular class.

Timothy Schultz:

That is extremely fascinating. I'm definitely going to check that out. But Lynne McTaggart, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Is there anything that you want to say today that I don't know enough to ask or that you just want to say?

Lynne McTaggart:

Timothy Schultz:

Well, it sounds very, very intriguing. And with sound and vibration and all of this, it is so interesting. So perhaps, hopefully we can have you back for another interview and get deep dive into that. But Lynne McTaggart, thank you so much for your time today. It's extremely fascinating and inspirational. So thank you very much for everything you're doing.

Lynne McTaggart:

Thank you, it's been great to be here with you.