22. THE POWERFUL NATURE
OF HUMAN INTENTION

WE HAVE THE CAPACITY TO EXTEND OUR OWN COHERENCE INTO THE ENVIRONMENT THROUGH OUR INTENTION AND WAY OF BEING.

During this time of reflection and research, I wrote to Dr. Jahn and Dr. Dunne at Princeton, telling them of my meeting at Pari and that Jeff and Jayne had strongly suggested I meet them. We agreed to have a conference call – and the first one led to several more.

In one of the early calls, I asked them for a reading list of reference material on the work they had done over the years, particularly on the effect of nonlocal consciousness – human intention acting on physical reality. I was particularly interested in the studies they had conducted in the PEAR Laboratory that Jeff had told me about.

They told me that Jahn had established PEAR in 1979 to pursue the rigorous scientific study of the interaction of human consciousness by using sensitive physical devices, systems, and processes common to contemporary engineering practice. During a span of over twenty-five years, they had retained an interdisciplinary staff of engineers, physicists, psychologists, and humanists to conduct a comprehensive agenda of experiments and had developed complementary theoretical models to enable a better understanding of what Bohm had spoken to me about and what we had considered in Pari – the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality.

Jahn and Dunne suggested a list of some thirty papers and books about their work at PEAR and were kind enough to send some of them to me. I began absorbing everything they sent to me and mentioned. In the process I found a special issue of Explore that was devoted entirely to the work of PEAR. It was an anthology containing the peer-reviewed publications, technical reports, and papers that had flowed from the program since 1979. That volume gave me a good overview and explanation of the extraordinary work of PEAR; and I found it of particular interest because the lead article in the volume was by a good friend of mine, Dr. Larry Dossey.

I had first met Larry in 1983, when I visited Dallas to consider opening an American Leadership Forum chapter there. The mayor and a number of the business and community leaders in Dallas had gathered, and as I made my way around the large room, I went over to Dossey, not knowing who he was, and introduced myself. We spoke for a moment or two, and out of the blue I brought up Bohm’s name. It turned out that Dossey was a devoted student of Bohm’s, having read Wholeness and the Implicate Order and other papers by and about him. From that moment, we had an important connection, and since then I have relied on him for advice and direction as I pursued my search to understand more about extraordinary human functioning.

At the time I met Larry, he was chief of staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital and had helped establish the Dallas Diagnostic Association, the largest group of internal medical practitioners in the city. He had been a battalion surgeon in Vietnam, where he had been decorated for valor. Over the years, we discussed how battlefield conditions enable greater collective consciousness.

In 2000, when we were conducting the research for the Alliance Project, I took Otto with me to spend a half-day with Larry and his wife, Barbara. I’ll never forget one particular part of that interview, when we were talking about the collapse of boundaries between self and others and how new realities arise. I asked, “Where does the willingness to risk your life for someone come from?”

“Why one human being would actually put his life on the line for another one has always puzzled me,” Larry said. “When I got back from Vietnam, I read Joseph Campbell’s Power of Myth. Campbell talked about an essay Schopenhauer wrote in which he asked the same question: ‘What is it that makes one individual in a situation of crisis or danger actually willing to give their life for another individual?’ His answer was that at that moment, they’re not two people; there is only one. So this person is not saving another person. This person has identified so completely that he no longer is separate from the other individual.”

Over the years, Larry became more and more interested in the role of the mind in health and healthcare, publishing nine books and numerous articles on the subject. The primary quality of all his work is scientific legitimacy and an insistent focus on “what the data shows.” As a result, his colleagues in medical schools and hospitals all over the country trust him and often invite him to share his insights. He has lectured all over the world, including at major medical schools and hospitals – Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and the Mayo Clinic. The impact of his work has been remarkable. Before his book Healing Words was published in 1993, only three US medical schools had classes devoted to exploring the role of prayer in health; currently eighty medical schools have initiated such courses, many of which utilize his works as textbooks. He introduced the concept of “nonlocal mind” as an emerging image of consciousness. It was for all of these reasons that I found Larry’s opening article in Explore so interesting.

Larry’s article gave an overview of the PEAR studies and why they are so important to human welfare. The PEAR team, in examining how consciousness manifests, has produced, he said, the largest database of its kind in the world, using random number generators (RNGs). RNGs are computer programs that generate numbers that meet statistical conditions for randomness, as required for various research applications. Because the RNGs are tested regularly to be sure they are shielded from electromagnetic, telecommunications, and all other sources of electronic interference, any deviation from the normal 50/50 chance “heads and tails” is significant rather than the result of a systematic bias.

In twenty-seven years of PEAR studies, participants – who are ordinary people, not highly gifted psychics – have been able to affect the random movement of the number generators simply by their remote intentions – their acts of will. So long as the participants willed the machine to register heads or tails, he or she had some influence on it a significant percentage of the time.

If you combine all the studies into a “meta-analysis,” as two of the scientists at PEAR have done, the odds of this overall score occurring are a trillion to one.

Dossey said, “The sustained ingenuity, precision and courage demonstrated by the PEAR team in examining how consciousness manifests may be unparalleled in the annals of science – in its ambition, audacity and reach, exceeding even the Manhattan Project.”

After reading and rereading all the technical reports and peer-reviewed articles in the Explore volume and after reading material on Jahn and Dunne’s reading list, I concluded that the scientific studies irrevocably confirm Bohm’s “unbroken wholeness” of the universe. This was, I thought, an important step in my search for understanding. We have the capacity to extend our own coherence into the environment through our intention and way of being.