28. THE POWER OF
PASSIONATE ATTENTION

THIS EXPERIENCE OF AN IMMEDIATE, TOTAL SENSE OF THE THING AS A WHOLE IS QUITE UNLIKE THE INFORMATIONAL PROCESSING EXPERIENCE OF NORMAL AWARENESS.

In that last workshop with him in 2008, Bruce told us of the studies the HeartMath team were conducting that year with a team of researchers from the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship (AGSE), which confirmed the 2004 results in the trials described earlier that were led by McCraty. The AGSE-HeartMath studies sought to explain the success of repeat entrepreneurs. Based on presentiment studies (this time using a roulette wheel and comparing serial entrepreneurs, ordinary business people, and unsuccessful entrepreneurs as the participants) and studies conducted in 2006 and 2007, the teams affirmed the earlier findings; but in these investigations “the pre-stimulus difference reflecting a nonlocal intuitive effect (was) 12–14 seconds before the betting outcome was presented to the participants.”

Bruce said these studies are moving the teams significantly closer to a large-scale field study on “nonlocal intuition” in which a statistically adequate sample of repeat entrepreneurs is compared with samples of unsuccessful entrepreneurs and ordinary business people. All of the evidence so far shows that the repeat entrepreneurs have a greater ability to perceive and process nonlocal information about potential business opportunities than unsuccessful entrepreneurs and the ordinary businessperson.

The team’s hypothesis is that the entrepreneur’s passion and highly focused attention directed to the future business opportunity attunes their body’s psychophysiological systems (brain, heart, and autonomic nervous system) to “a domain of quantum-holographical information, which contains implicit, energetically encoded information about the object.”

They further concluded, based on these studies, that nonlocal intention is sensed by the entrepreneur and perceived in the body and mind “as a certainty” about the “thing” yet to happen. This thing can be, for example, a mental construct such as a thought or idea. Often the feeling is one that is absolute, experienced as beyond question or doubt – and the feeling can encompass positive emotion, such as optimism and excitement. “This experience of an immediate, total sense of the thing as a whole is quite unlike the informational processing experience of normal awareness. In normal awareness, the contents of the mind are updated incrementally, as in moment-by-moment sequences of sensory experience unfold.”

Relying, in part, on the research conducted by William Tiller, the Stanford physicist with whom we had worked earlier that same year, the research teams found that the entrepreneurs’ ability to sense the future was enhanced when these subjects calmed their minds and feelings and adopted “a heart-focused state of positive emotion directed to the object.”

The findings of the AGSE-HeartMath team and their conclusions about the “source of intuitive information,” the role of risk-it-all intention, and the quality and delivery of the information (absolute certainty and arriving whole vs. incrementally) conforms precisely to my direct experience and to the studies, research, and evidence I had gathered over the years.

Reflecting on all I had learned from my second passage in Baja with John; from my time in Pari at the Bohm symposium; from the conversations in Princeton with Bob and Brenda; and from my own research, I formed the third principle:

3. There is a creative Source of infinite potential enfolded in the universe.

Connection to this Source leads to the emergence of new realities – discovery, creation, renewal, and transformation. We are partners in the unfolding of the universe.

During the later part of my visit with Bob and Brenda, we discussed two matters that set the course for the next stage of my journey: first, that organizations must pay attention to the deep Source of knowledge from which profound innovation occurs; and second, that organizations must develop core practices that inspire creativity and action.

But how could such organizations be developed? And what core practices would allow leaders to draw from the infinite potential of the Source? The answers to those questions were slowly revealed to me through a series of deep dialogues I had with Kaz.