681: The Field with Guest Lynn McTaggert

Hey, friends, I have a special show for you today. I've been rummaging around in my archives and I found this little jewel from season four of the Flow Dreaming podcast.

This is a long time ago.

I sound different. I don't sound like I sound today. I sound quite different. But it's still me. Just young baby me in my early years of interviewing and podcasting.

But the guest, the guess that's why.

I brought this out. It's none other than Lynne MacTaggart. Lynne's books the Field and the Intention Experiment had just come out within the last couple of years and I was full of questions for her about intention, the way our thoughts work, quantum ideas, quantum physics, and of course, how perhaps flow weaves in and out of all of these ideas. So without further ado, I want to introduce you to to Lynn and me, Baby me in this special excerpt of Flow Dreaming.

Flow Dreaming.

It'S a show where we talk about the power of your mind to change your world around you, to literally affect the fabric of your reality. We talk about this feeling of hope.

And joy and relief.

And that is what aware of your flow dust. It gives you a feeling of power again in your lives. I'm Summer McStravik and welcome to another.

Episode of Flow Dreaming.

Welcome to Flow Dreaming. Hi, I'm Summer McStravik. We have a special show for you today. As those of you who've listened for a long time know, very, very occasionally, I will have a guest on today. I'm excited to have Lyn McTaggart on. I recall first reading her book the Field years ago and it was, I would say it was the book that was the catalyst from my moving from the understanding of the flow as something that was intuitive faith based into a real understanding that there was a scientific basis, a background. And it took my comfort level to a new place because I recognized that all the pieces had come together. And that was largely due to Lynn's wonderful book, the field. Lynne MacTaggart. She's the author of five books, including the international best sellings the Field, as I just mentioned, as well as the book the Intention Experiment, which I believe is her latest out. She's an internationally recognized spokesperson on the science of spirituality. I'd like to welcome Lynn. Hi, how are you, Lynn?

Hi. Thanks. Thanks. It's nice to be here.

And you are coming the way from the UK this afternoon as well.

I am early evening for me.

Well, Lynne, I want to start by asking you to share with us what your understanding of the Field is because I think our Listeners are going to instantly recognize this as what we've been talking about as the flow for many years. But I want you to share it in your own words.

Okay. What I love about the idea of the field is that it's an actual something that physicists have known about for many years. They call it the zero point field, and it is created by the subatomic dance that goes on between particles. Subatomic particles trade energy back and forth just like an endless game of tennis. And in that energy exchange, a little thing called a virtual particle is created. It stays there for just less than the blink of an eye. And it's not very big. It's only about a half a watt's worth of energy exchange. But when you calculate all of the energy exchanges going on between every subatomic particle in the world, you come up with this gigantic, unfathomable amount of energy sitting there in empty space like some supercharged backdrop. Now, there are two really important implications here for all of us with the idea of a quantum energy field. One is that we're all connected, because subatomic waves, which is what these individual exchanges are, they're quantum energy waves, carry on forever, and they're infinite. They also have an infinite capacity for storage. So in a sense, they're like the Internet of the universe. They have all information that ever was in this sort of memory bank. And it's getting smarter every day. So in a sense, this whole memory field is something that we can tap into during extraordinary times. And it explains many of the kinds of experiences we've all had that are beyond the ordinary senses that are extra sensory.

Lynne, can we clarify? The field is not something that is necessarily outside of us. We are of the field ourselves. Is that correct?

Absolutely. We, our subatomic particles are also doing an energy dance with the field. And it is, you know, we are not other. We are all part of this. And I think it really explains to us and it provides a mechanism for us to understand that the world isn't made up of separate objects, but the world entirely exists in relationship to each other. We're all connected to this energy field.

I think that's particularly important because so much of our thinking does create this sense of separation. Heaven is elsewhere, we are here. Our minds are one place, our bodies are another. As if there are all these discrete objects and they don't really connect. Or it's very hard to make those connections, to make them talk to one another. The field, sort of the field understanding or the flow understanding gets rid of that set of distinctions between everything.

Absolutely. I mean, I think one of the problems we have is that our current scientific story describes a very well behaved universe of separate objects operating according to fixed laws in time and space. And we live by this kind of scientific story, and we. We live and breathe it as some kind of final truth. But the fact is that science is a story that unfolds in installments. And the new science describes a very different world and describes a very different reality for us. And once we really take that on board, we will see ourselves and each other as something very different, which is, as you say, not separate. Because right now we perceive of ourselves as being a sort of separate and finalized assemblage that is something other than everything else. And that the universe is out there. But soon we're going to understand that there is no out there out there.

Right, right. And my particular fascination with this is the intersection of consciousness and the impact of our consciousness and our abilities within this field or within the flow. And that's something that you have studied extensively, you researched, you probably uncovered. Every paper ever written explores this in both of your books.

I know my background is investigative reporter. I think showing up here, I can't. There's, you know, you're taught not to leave any stone unturned, Even, even the.

Ones that seem to contradict what you might be going after, what you may want to believe.

Absolutely. You have to look at it without fear or favor. You've got to just look at what the evidence is.

So one thing that I'm always talking to our listeners about in terms of consciousness Is that your consciousness is not existing strictly in your mind, in your brain. It's not just a percolating mass of, you know, neur. Neural networks moving along, kicking along thoughts. Your consciousness is existing outside of your brain, outside of your physical self. And therefore, whatever is occurring in your consciousness is impacting the field, it's impacting the flow, it's impacting the world around you second by second. And that's also what you have really zeroed in on, Especially with the intention experiment.

Absolutely. I mean, I think I wrote the intention experiment because I was left with a lot of tantalizing evidence from the field that consciousness is an actual energy with the ability to affect physical matter. And I wanted to find out exactly how much. What can we do with this? Where does it come from? How possibly could this work and how far can we go with it? What can we do with consciousness and intention? Can we make sure our children pass their math tests with our thoughts or can we cure cancer with our thoughts? How far can we go? Being the practical person that I am, and there's not much woo woo about me, I'm a very foot on the ground type person, I really wanted to find out how far we could go. But certainly, as you say, there's evidence that there's plenty of evidence to demonstrate that consciousness does not sit inside the brain and that consciousness is not locked in our skull, but that it's an ephemeral thing that has the ability to affect physical matter. And then it exists in a sense that the brain is like a transducer. It's like a television set and a television station all the time. It's beaming and transmitting and receiving information all the time, but it's not the repository of information.

And so that is really the crux of this, that the conscious mind can affect our physical reality through thought alone. I think that's what often sticks in people's throats a bit.

This.

It's like making. How can they comfortably make that leap from just believing to, you know, sort of a faith based believing to actually knowing? And that's where you've uncovered all of these studies that show just in one study after another, minute effects, measurable instruments measuring these effects of our mind on our reality without having, you know, any sort of physical, supposed physical means of doing this. You know, because we're so used to saying, well, if you want to, you know, crunch up a paper, you have to grab it with a physical hand and do it. There's no other way to affect something physical than with touch or sight or sound or smell. Do you know what I'm saying?

Yeah. I mean, according to, you know, physics as we know it, fundamental physics, they believe that influence occurs only through force. You know, that we have to drop it, freeze it, burn it, or give it a good swift kick. That's how you make something physical, something, you influence something, and that's how you make something do something else. Something changed, but we're now understanding that actually we can just think about something changing and we can change it. And we find that that's true with. There have been many, many studies of those things called random event generators, which are electronic devices that are like a 21st century toss of a coin. And there have been hundreds and thousands of studies of sitting a person, a participant in front of one of these machines. It's usually a computer program with flashing images, let's say cowboys and Indians. So it flashes cowboys half the time and Indians half the time. They found that if somebody sits in front of the computer and says, I want more Indians than cowboys. They will get that effect a small but significant percentage of the time. Same thing with affecting animals and living things. There have been many, many, many studies showing that thought alone can affect everything from single celled organisms to full fledged complex human beings and everything in between. And studies of trying to send thoughts to make hamsters run faster on activity wheels. And many, many, many studies of things like healing. So there's a lot of really robust evidence showing all of this. And what's more, and what's more disturbing, I think, to us who have been brought up with this Newtonian view of the world, this view of the world given to us by Isaac Newton some 300 plus years ago is that these effects occur just as well, no matter what time they're sent, no matter how far you are from the target. So time and space seem to be irrelevant, which is really, really difficult for us to get our minds around.

That's right. It brings up the idea of time's arrow, this idea that time does travel in one direction, or we perceive it too. But you talk about something called retro causation in your book or the ability to actually change the past. I mean, we're much more comfortable with the idea of changing the future. But really changing the past is as much of an unknown as the future.

Well, I think, you know, the whole idea of time is hard for us to get our minds around this too. But time is actually just a human construct. It's just an idea. Physicists, many physicists these days are understanding that our concept of time isn't elastic enough to encompass everything that they're finding out about time. And there have been many, many studies of intention showing, as I say, that it doesn't matter when you generate the thought, it still seems to have an effect. There was a classic study by an Israeli professor who wanted to actually debunk alternative medicine. So he came up with what he thought was the most ridiculous study he could think of. This study involved patients with a very serious infection called sepsis. It's blood infection and it's potentially fatal. He took these group of patients, divided them in half and set intention in terms of prayer to one half of them. And the other group were just given their normal medication. When he calculated afterward what had happened to the two groups, he found that the patients sent intention were better in every way. They got out of the hospital faster, they healed faster, they were better in every way. But there was an interesting aspect to the study. The patients had been in the hospital between the years 1992 and 94. The study and the praying was done in the year 2000, six to eight years later. So he published the study, and he thought this would demonstrate that you can't use the scientific model to study stuff like prayer. The way it was interpreted, though, was that you can go back to change the past. That's how everybody interpreted his study. And it's very tantalizing because it would suggest that it doesn't matter when the praying was done. When he looked at the records of these people and they had all left the hospital, he found that that group that he had randomly chosen, actually after they got prayers, they had done better and he'd controlled it so much that you can't say that it was confounded by just selection, that he just happened to, by luck, have selected a group of people who did better than the other. And there's not only his study, but many, many other studies that suggest also that we can send an intention and it doesn't matter when we send it, it affects its target. So the scientists have looked at this and they considered it this way. It's not that we're going back and changing what already happened. It's that our minds have the ability to travel, in a sense, to any point in time and to affect what happens in the first place, as well.

As to continue that effect even when we are not thinking of it. Lynn, stay with me. We're going to be going to a break now, but we'll be coming back with more. And I'd like to ask you about the experiments that you have, in fact, carried out with a group of your readers and people worldwide through the Internet. I'd like to hear how that has turned out as well. So please stay with me. I'm Summer McStravik. You are listening to Lynn McTaggart here on Flow Dreaming.

We're not actually going to an ad, like I said. This is a special excerpt of a beautiful interview from many years ago with the wonderful Lynne McTaggart. And I hope you're enjoying it. I'm listening to it occasionally, cringing at my word choices and inflections. But Lynne, as always, is stellar as ever. So we're gonna get right back to her right now, and I hope you're enjoying it.

Well, thanks for tuning in today. I'm Summer McStradik here with a special guest, Lynn McTaggart, joining us today on Flow Dreaming to talk about her work defining, understanding the field, compiling much, much scientific data that she has been sharing with us this hour. About it. Her work and my own are very, very complimentary. And if you have not been exposed to her books, you definitely should take a look at them. I'd like to give out your websites, Lynn, if you don't mind. One is livingthefield.com another one is the intentionexperiment.com and I also understand you have a new website and you offer workshops. Lynne, do you want to tell us briefly about that?

Okay. Well, the website will be up and running tomorrow or Friday. It is www.theintentionworkshop.com. but it'll be up, up tomorrow or Friday. And it is. But you can also access this on our sites too. Our other sites. We're running a series of workshops about bringing intention into your life and being able to live it in your work, with your relationships, with your children. And we'll be running them in Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland and Boston this year, as well as London, England and Holland.

And so in these workshops you are training people to work with the field, to work with their consciousness, to work with intention, with manifestation, correct?

Absolutely. They'll understand exactly how it works and basically wake up to who they really are and then being able to live consciously and with intention. So that life isn't an accident. Life is. Life is planned and set and life is in control. And that they are working and accessing the field and higher consciousness all the time.

Lynn, let's talk a little bit about what we left off before the break. I sort of led with the idea that once you create information, once you insert data or place a template of desire into the field, into this flow, it stays there, does it not? I mean, do you. My understanding is that once we imprint an energy or create something, it continues to exist. It may be sort of written over in a sort of illusionary way with new ideas or new desires, but all information that is ever created at some place remains. Therefore, if you are creating using your consciousness, even if you set aside the thought and you go about your daily activities, it's not as if it stops working or stops creating just because you're not focused on it. Do you agree with that? Is that what you found?

Well, I think that, you know, we have to think of a thought as an actual. Not only a thing, but a thing that affects other things. And a thought, as you say, a kind of a permanent entity. And a very good. I mean, I'm very fact based. So I will talk in terms of the evidence. There's certainly some really interesting evidence for intention, type of. And thought type therapies. There's a thing called thought field therapy, and there's been some really interesting evidence showing that even when the tragic victims of the former Yugoslavia conflict were treated with this, there was a 100% response. Now, this treatment, thought field therapy, is about clearing negative thoughts. And this was used even for these victims of post traumatic distress syndrome. These people were really, really, really disturbed by the atrocities they'd seen. And yet working on their thoughts, working on the thoughts as a field, almost think of it as a psychic bubble around them, they were able to change their whole state and turn these traumatized people into, in a sense, normal people again. And so there's a wonderful example of the idea that when you put a thought out there, it's something that's an actual entity there. But in terms of whether it can be permanent, I think it can be altered because of things like that, because of the energy therapies that are using a number of techniques to clear thoughts that stay in the body and stay in the field. So I guess I'm talking about negative thinking, but in terms of manifestation of desire, I think probably as long as you actually believe that intention, and I think that's what's key here, is belief, a real sense that something is really going to happen, then I think you do put it out there as an intention. And I also think certain techniques are really important. I know that certain people sense manifestation as something akin to just happy thoughts. But the intention masters that I interviewed, I interviewed many masters of intention qigong masters, master healers, Buddhist monks, to find out how they use intention to perform many of the feats that they do, changing their body temperature by 20 degrees, any of those kinds of amazing things that they do, healing people from a distance. And all of them talked about techniques, techniques that kind of have their individual differences, but basically boiled down to very similar types of techniques. And one other really important element was highly focused state of mind. And so I think that's really key to sending effective intention.

Certainly our listeners will recognize flow dreaming as one of those techniques. As you mentioned, it's a variation. I call it sort of a backdoor way in, a stumbling way in. But again, it does rely on a highly focused state of mind. Yeah, yeah, so.

And I think a lot of people believe or are under the impression that when you send intention, you get into a meditative state, and in that state, your brain slows down. Actually, the studies of intention masters I've looked at, their brains speed up to something operating faster than normal waking consciousness. They're in a state of Peak attention. They are what I call getting into hyperspace. They are attending to the present with every pore of their bodies. So it's that kind of highly focused state that I feel is very important for sending intention.

Now one thing that you write in your book, I'm just going to read this, is that you talk about how we are sort of inadvertently sending out attention or intention. You say the studies raise a possibility that our thoughts spill out of us at every moment, may also affect inanimate objects within our reach. That idea is that wherever we go, whatever we're doing, we are affecting, we are imprinting, we are creating with our minds and with that idea in mind. Not just with inanimate objects, but we often think ill of other people. We often, you know, might send out an irritation at the driver who cuts us off in the lanes. What do you think of that?

I think that's right. I think with every time that, you know, I think with everything the mind does, it's sending in a sense an intention. And that's the worry. I mean, we think of intention as being only those very, very focused states as we talked about before. But I think, you know, when you, if you were to poll somebody and ask them to give you a moment by moment description of what they're thinking about all the time, you'd find that they have very focused intention on their own failures. They have very focused intention on judgment of other people. And that in a sense becomes their life's intention.

So it's a repetition of small thoughts. You know, this brings up an idea. I've heard, I've spoken with many different people about this subject and some have said, well, you have to hold a thought for seven seconds or you know, some odd, you know, number. Other people say, well, no, no, no, you have to experience a full emotional involvement. It's as if there are different criteria for activating or making the intention effective. Certainly in flow dreaming we focus on creating sort of an unfolding of the future, unfolding of the moment through intense emotion as well as, you know, full, you know, body and mental engagement. Have you found that there are certain criteria that are just absolute that, you know, whether it's time based or depth based or you know, reaching your mind into a certain particular brain brainwave. What have you found?

Okay, well, I found that emotional state, you know, and belief really important. Belief is key as a key element. We're testing. I mean, a lot of people have individual things that work for them. I suppose what we're trying to do is to bring some science to it and to say, well, what have we found in experimental data? In the studies that I've looked at and there are hundreds of them, I certainly haven't found any time limitation or time saying that you've got to have this. And actually I think people have had to be, have had to believe in what they were going to do and that would seem to have an effect. So an emotional engagement somehow would be important. In our own studies we've tended to use 10 minutes as our period of sending intention and that has been completely and utterly arbitrary. But it has worked. Every study we've done so far has worked.

Yeah, and that's a wonderful lead because I was just going to ask you before we end our interview to tell me more about the intention experiments that you have conducted and what you are doing with that.

Okay. Well, I was very interested in the whole idea of group mind and whether we can marshal people together as a unified force to see if we can affect important problems on the planet and use intention as a force for good. Because I know there's plenty of material written about manifesting personally. So I wanted to see if we could manifest globally. But there wasn't a lot of studies about this. There were some tantalizing things about the effect of group mind, but nothing really definitive. And so my husband turned to me one night and said, why don't you do these studies yourself? And that seemed a ridiculous idea because I'm not a scientist and I haven't done any kind of experiments for many years. High school biology was pretty much the last time. But I thought to myself, well, actually I've got lots and lots of readers around the planet. The field is in 20 languages and I could invite these people to come together on the Internet because the Internet is a wonderful unifying force now. And if we worked with some scientists sending attention to some distant target in their lab, we would have the largest global laboratory in the world and we'd have the largest mind over matter experiment in the world. That's what we've been doing and we've had some amazing studies so far. We've done experiments to affect light emissions of various things. We've done them on leaves. Now that sounds like a pretty pathetic kind of experiment compared to trying to cure cancer or something like that. But the scientists convinced me last year when we were starting that we had to start demonstrating that we could have any effect at all because we were trying something that had never been tried before. So our first experiments were just to see if we can affect the tiny Light emissions that are emitted by all living things, they're called biophoton emissions and they're highly sensitive. And if we could demonstrate we were having any kind of significant effect, that would be important. It would show we could make a change. We did it. And each time we run an experiment, we run it three, four, five times. Because if you do it once in science, that means nothing. You've got to run it and repeat it and replicate it, as they call it, to show that you've really got what you've got is not just chance, it's really a significant effect. So we found this. And with each of our studies, we've had controls with a leaf. We had people both on the Internet and in groups that I've spoken in front of all around the world, we've sent intentions to a leaf and shown that we have a huge effect on that leaf sent intention increase its light significantly. And we can demonstrate that in actual cameras that are highly sensitive pieces of equipment that can photograph this light and demonstrate a difference, plus count it photon by photon. So we've done that. We've done things showing that we can change the cluster structure and light emissions from water, which is even from just sending water love, not even sending in a directed intention. That's with a scientist called Konstantin Korotkoff in St. Petersburg in Russia. The first studies we've done with the leaf were with Dr. Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona. He's a prominent psychologist there and runs a lab there. Then we've done a whole series of experiments showing we can make plants sprout earlier and grow faster. With this experiment, we've had four sets of seeds. I've run this now, I believe, five times. And we had our audiences send intention to one set of seeds. And we had three controls. And in this study, as with all studies, the scientists didn't know which seeds we were sending intention to. What they would do is, after we were finished, they would plant all four sets of seeds and then measure them over a couple of weeks to see which sprouted earlier and which grew better and faster. And in every instance, it has been the seed sent intention. In fact, in one instance, when I was speaking in front of a group of healers, experienced healers, the seeds grew twice as large as control.

Lynn, our program, our time with you, rather, is sort of wrapping up right now, but I want to thank you very much for joining us for the portion that you are able to stay with us in.

Wonderful.

And there is no good way to end that interview except very abruptly after that Lynn and I went on to talk about some upcoming events that are surely quite long past by now. Unless of course, we want to go back and sort of mess with the past like she and I discussed. But I hope you guys really enjoyed this flashback into the way people were thinking a decade or more ago. And for those of you who've been in personal growth for a decade, two decades, three decades or more, kind of a neat way of seeing where a lot of current thinking today evolved from took root. So it's been my pleasure to be with you and I hope you really enjoyed this. If you did, by the way, shoot me an email summerlowdreaming.com I always love hearing from you, especially as I am thinking up new topics for us to discuss and roll around together. All right, my dears, take care. Much love to you all and I'll see you for another episode of Flow Dreaming. My friends, Flow on is a brand new membership and its goal is to keep you in flow, in alignment and in a state of beautiful growth and emergence. Emergence into the next you. Sometimes this is going to mean some healing or renewing your energy from depression or burnout. Or maybe you're going to be pushing into new areas of growth and rampant success. Well, Flow on is your monthly spiritual backpack. It's a brand new program. I haven't done any anything like it since. Well, it's been so many years when I used to have a Flow Dream of the Month club. Think of this as its new 21st century iteration and Flowon has everything that you need. It's a monthly masterclass, a monthly Flow dream, even some live interaction. And best of all, you can come and go as you please. There's no long term commitments, so please check it out@flowdreaming.com if you're lucky enough and it's enrolling, do grab a spot. It will not be open and available at all times all year. But if it's open, please jump in. I know you won't be disappointed and I look forward to traveling with you on this beautiful journey of flow and giving you so many tools. All the tools that I've ever created.

Sam.