Thought Matters

Koinonia Church – 2 May 2010

Presented by Craig Little

A few weeks ago, a bunch of people were bustling around here getting ready for the community garden fundraising dinner.  Some were setting up chairs, some were decorating, some were at home cooking.  Others had solicited silent auction items to be sold.  It took some doing, but it all came together and resulted in a very nice and successful event.

Marillac Clinic is a well-known organization in town that started over 20 years ago.  In those two decades, a large number of people have worked and volunteered there.  They are clinicians, administrators, special event planners, fundraisers, members of the board, committee members and many other things.  It took a long time, but the clinic is now a shining example of how health care might be delivered nationally.

This morning, you heard the choir sing “The Night Shall Be Filled With Music.”  It was beautiful, if I do say so myself.  Again, it took a lot of work.  When we first started working on it, it seemed awfully difficult.  It was dissonant and had parts singing unfamiliar notes.  But the result turned out pretty nicely.

Now what do these three things all have in common?  It may be obvious that all resulted from a great deal of effort and commitment on the part of those involved.  But, maybe more importantly, all three started with a thought. 

• Someone, I don’t know who, on the community garden committee said, “Let’s buy a pump so we can irrigate and let’s have a fundraiser to do it.” 
• With Marillac Clinic, a group of people recognized that many people in Grand Junction were underinsured and used the emergency room instead of a primary care physician.  That was, and still is, costly. Someone thought and said, 20 years ago, let’s create a clinic to serve people who need this kind of care.  A committee was formed that hatched this idea and within a few months, a clinic was born. 
• We may always have had a choir here, but still someone, in this case Linda, has the confidence to think “this group can sign a lot of different things.  I know this song sounds weird at first, but it’s really beautiful when we put it together.”

All of these things started with a thought.  So, that’s what I want to explore this morning:  the power of thought, what science is learning about it and how it might affect each of us.

Thoughts have power.  This might seem like nothing new to any of you.  After all there have been countless books written on the subject of thought and attitude over the years.  The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, Healing Words by Dr. Larry Dossey, and many others.  Not to minimize it, but those seem to deal with how we change ourselves, not the world. 

That may be changing.

Several years ago, I read a book called “The Field.”  I talked about it one Sunday here.  The Field’s author Lynne McTaggart, a journalist, said her curiosity was piqued by her practice of “Bumping up against miracles.  Not miracles in the ordinary sense of the term, where seas part, or loaves of bread exponentially multiply, but miracles, nonetheless, in their utter violation of the way we think the world works…”  Among other things she came across miracles which had hard scientific evidence concerning methods of healing that are counter to our conventional notions of biology. 

The Field talked about all sorts of experiments.   Things like:

• Extrasensory perception done by an astronaut on Apollo 14 on his return trip from the moon
• The ability of certain people to literally change the roll of the dice
• The ability of atoms or molecules to communicate with each other over long distances.

Much of the work that is described in the The Field sounds like science fiction, but isn’t.    For the most part, we don’t understand it and it’s too fantastic to believe. 

But the more I read, the more I am beginning to see what can happen.  Take the case of the Meditation Experiment involving Washington DC.  This study was published in the scientific journal Social Indicators Research.   Researchers hypothesized in advance that the calming influence of group meditation practice could reduce violent crime by over 20 percent in Washington, D.C., during an 8-week period in the summer of 1993.

 The demonstration project involved assembling nearly 4,000 practitioners from 81 countries. Participants were housed in hotels and college dormitories throughout the District of Columbia and at the University of Maryland

One of the lead researchers says previous research had shown that these meditation techniques "create a state of deep relaxation and coherence in the individual and simultaneously appear to produce an effect that spreads into the environment, influencing people who are not practicing the techniques and who have no knowledge of the experiments themselves."

In fact, the findings later showed that the rate of violent crime--which included assaults, murders, and rapes--decreased by 23 percent during the June 7 to July 30 experimental period. The odds of this result occurring by chance are less than 2 in 1 billion. Rigorous statistical analyses ruled out an extensive list of alternative explanations, according to John Hagelin, lead author of the study and director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa.

You may have noticed that the last reading this morning was from a novel, The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown.  It’s the third book in his series that includes The DaVinci Code. 

One of Brown’s fictional characters, Katherine, is a scientist involved in noetics research. It’s the study of the power of human thought and consciousness, which he calls a highly ordered energy capable of changing the physical world. In the book, the fictional Katherine is enthralled with work being done by the actual McTaggart.  She has written another book entitled “The Intention Experiment.”  Its website says it is a book without an ending.  She claims it is also is the first book to provide all the scientific evidence about human intention. Also according to the website, it is also the first to show you how to use this power in your life, individually and collectively according to all the principles that have worked both in the laboratory and among ‘masters’ of intention.  The Intention Experiment is also the first book to invite the reader, to take an active part in its original research.

What is intention?  It’s not a new word, but to use it as a verb, “to intend,” seems new.  If it feels better to you, substitute the word meditate or pray. 

What the Intention Experiment does is to test the power of thought, of intention, of prayer, or meditation, to change the physical, the measurable, world.  With the help of physicists in Arizona and Germany, she has set up a series of scientifically controlled, web-based experiments testing the power of intention to change the physical world.  Thousands of volunteers from 30 countries around the world have participated in Intention Experiments thus far.

In the pilot experiment, McTaggart asked a group of 16 meditators based in London to direct their thoughts to four remote targets in Dr. Fritz-Albert Popp’s laboratory in Germany: two types of algae, a plant and a human volunteer.  The meditators were asked to attempt to lower certain measurable biodynamic processes. Popp and his team discovered significant changes in all four targets while the intentions were being sent, compared to times the meditators were ‘resting’. 

Another group of studies have been conducted by participants of the Intention Experiment, having to do with germinating seeds.  The experiment involves meditators, or healers, or intenders, if you will, at far flung locations attempting to get one set of seeds to germinate sooner than another set, simply for sending that thought to them.  They have run them with intenders on the internet, with an audience at a seminar in Sydney, Australia, another at Hilton Head, SC.  The seeds, by the way were located in a laboratory at the University of Arizona.  In general, the seeds germinated sooner and grew faster than those seeds which the audience did not focus on.  I’m not going to go in to more detail, but just say that the results were good enough to get them published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.  The bottom line is that these audiences, sometimes of people trained to heal or focus, but sometimes just with whomever showed up on the internet at the day of the experiment, made a physical difference from a long distance away.

The cool thing about the Intention Experiment is that we can join in.  Her website has a place for people to sign up if they want to be part of an intention experiment.  That is, if you want to focus your mind on growing seeds, or realigning the crystalline structure or water, or purifying a polluted lake, among others.

My guess is that some of you, like me, when I first bumped in to the idea of Intention thought, “well that’s interesting, but what does it have to do with me?”
 
It’s sort of like the story of a woman who lived way out in the country. She went to a great deal of trouble and expense to have electrical power installed in her home. After a couple of months, the electric company noticed she didn’t seem to use very much electricity at all.

Thinking there might be a problem with the hookup, they sent a meter reader out to check. The man came to the door and said, "We’ve just checked your meter and it doesn’t seem that you’re using much electricity. Is there a problem?"

"Oh no" she said. "We’re quite satisfied. We turn on the electric lights every night to see how to light our lamps and then we switch them off again."

Now, why didn’t this woman make more use of her electricity? She believed in electricity.  She went to a great deal of trouble and expense to have her house wired for it.  BUT - she didn’t understand the potential of electricity in her home.  AND SO, she used its power sparingly

I suspect there are people who use meditation or prayer very much the same way.  They believe that meditation works for some people.  They’ve even read and heard stories about answered prayers.  BUT they use prayer or meditation or intention sparingly… if at all. (paraphrased from the-power-of-persistent-prayer-jeff-strite-sermon-on-prayer-how-to-49222.asp)

 I wonder why?  It may be because we think we’re too busy to set aside the time to meditate, intend, pray, whatever you’d like to call it.  Maybe it’s because we don’t feel worthy of asking for something special for ourselves.  Maybe it’s because we don’t want to trouble God because he’s too busy.  It may be that we’re afraid of looking stupid, sitting there concentrating on a set of seeds to make them grow faster.  Maybe it’s because we just simply don’t believe that we are capable of making a difference.

As Jo said to me yesterday morning:
HOW DO I GET TO THE POINT OF BELIEVING I CAN REALLY DO THIS?

I don’t suppose to offer an easy answer, because I don’t think there is one.  But, it may all simply come back to the beginning – it all begins with a thought.  If I start to think that I CAN do it, then I’m started on the way to doing it. 

Some of you are aware of the book and movie, “The Secret.” The bottom line of The Secret is that you get what you think about.  It’s based on the Law of Attraction which says that that which is like unto itself, is drawn. In other words, that which you think, in any moment, attracts unto itself other thoughts that are like it. So, if you dwell on unpleasantness, you will be being to experience it.  Concentrating on the good will reveal the good. 

Second, what ever it is: prayer, meditation, intention, it takes practice.  As McTaggart says on her website, Intention – requires technique and practice.  She says thatanyone can learn to do effective intention in their life, but it does require some learned techniques.  To find out how to ‘do intention’, she interviewed many intention masters – Qigong masters, Buddhist monks, master healers – as well as scientists.   She created a program that offers a blueprint for using intention effectively. 

Now, this is not a commercial for her program!   I don’t get a cut if you go to    http://www.theintentionexperiment.com/.  There are lots of other ways to study meditation, prayer, intention.  If we want to learn more, we can do that.  Just type in those words “intention” on Google and you’ll be amazed.

My point is simply that if first we decide we want to increase the power of our influence over the world and our own lives, we need to have that first thought. 

Meditation, intention, prayer: whatever we call it, it has great power.  And because our thoughts do have so much power, especially collectively, we should do as Paul wrote to the Phillipians.  “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”