The Field (34 page)

With his own Esalen study, Nelson discovered that the most riveting moment of the meeting had also produced a strong deviation from randomness in the data.

The results were intriguing, but the idea needed to be tested further, in all sorts of venues. To best accomplish this, though, he needed a device that was truly portable. The hardware had been cumbersome and unwieldy, requiring its own power supply. Nelson thought of using a Hewlett Packard palm computer, which was not much bigger than a pocket tape recorder, with a miniaturized REG device sitting on top, plugged into the serial port, kept in place with a piece of Velcro.

Nelson wasn’t interested in whether he’d got more heads than tails since no one would be expressing an intention. All he wanted to determine was whether the machine had deviated in any direction away from its 50 – 50 random activity. Any change – whether more heads or more tails, or sometimes more heads and then sometimes more tails – would be construed as a departure from chance. This called for a different statistical method of analyzing the data from that used by the PEAR lab for its ordinary studies. Nelson decided to use a method called ‘chi square’, which entailed plotting the square of each individual run. Any unusual behavior, some prolonged or extreme deviation from its expected random heads-or-tails-type monotony, would easily show up.

Nelson had called these experiments in ‘field consciousness’, or ‘Field-REG’, for short. The name had had a neat double entendre. It was a REG out in the field, but also a device used to test if there was such a thing as a ‘consciousness field’.

Nelson decided to try his FieldREG on events of every variety – business meetings, academic meetings, a humor conference, concerts, theatrical events. He sought out compelling events that would keep the audience riveted – moments when a great number of people were all engaged in the same intense thought at the same time.
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When a member of the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (CUUPS) expressed an interest in the PEAR work, Nelson loaned him a FieldREG and the machine attended fifteen of their ritual pagan gatherings – including Sabbats and those held during the full moon.
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The friend of a PEAR colleague, the artistic director of a large musical review called
The Revels
, which is mounted in eight US cities each December to see in the New Year, approached Nelson about trying out a FieldREG trial with his show. It seemed perfect: it had ritual, it had music, it had audience participation. Roger viewed the production and asked the artistic director to pick the five most engaging portions of the show that would most affect the audience and hence the machine. The FieldREG attended ten shows in two cities in 1995 and several performances in eight cities in 1996. As if on cue, each moment that Nelson had predicted caused a glitch in the machine’s data.
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A definite pattern was emerging. The machine was moving out of its random movements into some sort of order precisely during moments of peak attention: special presentations at meetings, the climaxes of humor conferences, the most intense moments of a pagan ritual. For a REG machine, whose movements were so delicately minuscule, these effects were relatively large – three times what it was for individuals at PEAR trying to affect the machines on their own. In the pagan sessions, the FieldREG had veered wildly off course twice, both during full-moon rituals, recording many more tails than usual.

One CUUPS group member was not surprised when Nelson told him the results. ‘On the whole,’ he remarked, ‘our Sabbats are not very personal or intense, whereas the moons sometimes are.’
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The particular activity didn’t really matter. What seemed most important was the intensity of the group, the ability of the activity to keep its audience spellbound, and it helped if there was some sort of collective resonance in the group, particularly some context that was emotionally meaningful to them. At the humor conference, the machine made its biggest deviation during an evening keynote presentation, which was so funny the audience had given the comic a standing ovation and demanded an encore. What was clearly most important was that everyone was focused in rapt attention, all thinking the same thought.

What appeared to be happening was that when attention focused the waves of individual minds on something similar, a type of group quantum ‘superradiance’ occurred which had a physical effect. The REG machine was in a sense a kind of thermometer, measuring the dynamics and coherence of the group. Only the business and academic meetings had no effect on the machine. If a group was bored and its attention was wandering, in a manner of speaking the machine was bored, too. It was just the intense moments of like-mindedness which seemed to gather enough power to impart some order on the chaotic purposelessness of a REG machine.

The idea of sacred sites intrigued Nelson. Were they sacred because their use over the centuries had invested them with that quality, or had there been a quality about the site – the configuration of trees or stones, the spirit of place, its very location – that had been there from the beginning, leading human beings to naturally select it for that purpose? Ancient peoples had been sensitive to the earth’s signals, able to read and pay attention to certain configurations such as ley lines. If there was something different about the place itself, had a type of collective consciousness coalesced there like an energetic whorl, or had some sort of energetic resonance always existed? And would any of this register on a REG machine?

Nelson decided to seek out several sites in America that had been sacred to Native Americans. Nelson and his machine observed a medicine man performing a ritual healing ceremony at the Devil’s Tower monument in Wyoming, a place considered sacred by certain tribes. Later, he walked around Devil’s Tower himself with a PalmREG in his pocket, and then visited Wounded Knee in South Dakota, the site of the massacre of an entire Sioux tribe. Nelson surveyed the desolation, the cemetery and the monument to the dead. He fell into a deep quiet. Later, when he looked at the data for the two places, it was beyond doubt: his machine’s output was definitely being affected, and with a far larger effect size than ordinary PEAR studies, as though there were some lingering memory of the thoughts of all the people who’d lived and died there.
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The perfect opportunity to look closer at the nature of collective memory and resonance arose during a trip to Egypt. Nelson decided to attend a two-week tour of Egypt with a group of nineteen colleagues, planning to visit the main temples and sacred sites of the ancient Egyptians, where they would carry out a series of informal ceremonies, such as chanting and meditation. This trip would give him the chance to see whether people engaged in meditative activities at these sites – the kind of activities, in a sense, for which the sites had originally been built – had even more effect on the machines. Nelson kept a PalmREG running in his coat pocket during visits to all the major sites – the great Sphinx, the Temples of Karnak and Luxor, the Great Pyramid of Giza. The PalmREG was on while the group meditated or chanted and when they were simply wandering through the temples, and even during moments when he was on his own, touring or meditating. He also kept a careful record of times when various activities had occurred.

When he’d returned home and compiled all his data, an interesting pattern emerged. The strongest effects on the machine occurred during times when the group was engaged in a ritual such as chanting at a sacred site. In most of the main pyramids, the effects had been six times that of ordinary REG trials at PEAR and twice those of ordinary FieldREG trials. These were among the largest effects he’d seen – as large as those for a bonded couple. But when he put together all the data of the twenty-seven sacred sites he’d visited, while simply walking around them with no more than a respectful silence, the results were even more astounding. The spirit of the place itself appeared to register effects every bit as large as the meditating group.

Of course, as he was carrying around the PalmREG in his pocket, his own expectations might have affected it – a well-known phenomenon referred to as the ‘experimenter effect’. It could have been the collective expectations and awe of the other visitors – after all, he was never at the sites on his own. But some other controls demonstrated that the situation was a little more complicated. Again, when the group attempted chanting and meditation in other sites which were not deemed to be sacred but were nevertheless interesting, the effects on the PalmREG were significant, but smaller. Even when the members of the group seemed attuned to each other – during a solar eclipse, attending a special astrology session, or a sunset birthday party – the machine’s effects were also small, not much greater than the effects observed during a standard REG trial. Nelson even monitored a series of his own focused ritual – during prayer at a mosque or certain ritual walks and while observing and trying to ‘decode’ hieroglyphics. Many of them had been involving to Nelson – some deeply moving. Nevertheless, the machine’s output deviated a little, but no more than it would have if he were home in Princeton, sitting in front of a REG machine. Clearly, some resonance reverberated at the sites, possibly even a vortex of coherent memory.

Both the type of place and the activity of the group seemed to play contributing roles in creating a kind of group consciousness. In the sacred sites where chanting hadn’t taken place, simple group presence, or perhaps even the place itself, held a high degree of resonating consciousness. The machine had also registered an effect, even in the midst of the more mundane activities or places, so long as the group’s attention had been aroused. And no matter how deeply engaged Nelson had been on his own, he could not match the effect size of the group.

There was one other remarkable element of his data. During his trip to the Great Pyramid of Khufu on the Giza plateau, the PalmREG had veered off its random course with a positive trend during two group chants inside the Queen’s Chamber and the Grand Gallery and then had a strongly negative trend in the King’s Chamber, where they’d carried on their chant. A similar situation had occurred at Karnak. Nelson was amazed once the results had been plotted on a graph; both of them formed a large pyramid. It was hard to keep from thinking that, on some level, the PalmREG had been experiencing Nelson’s trip in parallel.
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Dean Radin had been at the Direct Mental Healing meeting and had seen Nelson’s weird data. As Radin had been an associate of Nelson’s and a co-author of the PEAR data meta-analysis, he was a natural candidate to replicate Nelson’s work.

With his first studies, Radin, like Nelson, discovered that these effects happen when a FieldREG is present in the room or at the site. But what about at long distance? The most obvious vehicle for long-distance like-mindedness was television. Everybody watched television, particularly the popular shows. Would they all be thinking the same thing while they watched? To test this, Radin needed something beyond a sitcom – an event that would guarantee an audience on the edge of its seat.
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The O.J. Simpson trial verdict would later represent a natural choice. But for his first study, Radin chose the Sixty-seventh Academy Awards in March 1995, which, with its estimated viewer size of one billion, was one of the biggest audiences he could think of. This audience comprised people in 120 different countries, so their contribution in mass attention would be coming from around the world.

To further demonstrate that the effects happened instantaneously at any distance, Radin used two REG machines, placed in different spots. One sat about 20 yards from him as he watched the event on March 27, the other was in his lab about 12 miles away, running on its own and not in front of a television set. During the broadcast, both Radin and his assistant painstakingly noted down, minute by minute, the high interest and low interest moments of the show. Any moments of peak tension, such as the announcement of the winners for best picture, best actor or actress, were timed and noted as ‘high coherence’ periods.

After the show ended, he examined his data. During the highest interest periods, the machines’ degree of order increased to such a level that the odds against it having occurred by chance were 1000 to 1. During the low interest periods, on the other hand, the degree of order was at a lower level, with odds against it having occurred by chance no greater than 10 to 1. Both computers were also run for four hours after the event, and during this control period, after a tiny high, possibly reflecting the end of the awards ceremony, both quickly returned to their usual random behavior. Radin replicated his own experiment a year later, with similar results. He got the same kind of results with the Summer Olympics of July 1996 and of course the O.J. Simpson trial.

Radin tried out his machines on the Superbowl of 1996 and even general prime time TV on all four major television stations one evening in February of that year. During the most important moments of the Superbowl game, the machine deviated slightly, but the effect wasn’t anywhere near as marked as it was during the O.J. Simpson trial or the Academy Awards. This may have to do with one simple problem with a sports event – the fact that groups of people react differently and passionately to each play, depending on which team they are rooting for. Radin also figured it might have something to do with the number of commercial breaks continually chopping up the game, especially as the advertisements shown during Superbowl have become as popular as the game itself. It was sometimes difficult to distinguish times of high interest from times of low interest and the results showed it.