Statistical results are in for Lynn McTaggart’s “9/11 Peace Experiment.”  For the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Lynn teamed up with Dr. Salah Al-Rashed, described as the Deepak Chopra of the Middle East.  Together, they solicited volunteers from 75 countries around the world in the 9/11 Peace Intention Experiment.

The project started with a mutual apology.  Participants joined together to offer an apology first from the Arab perspective, for allowing the 9/11 tragedy to happen, and next from the Western perspective, for the extreme nature of its military retaliation.

On 9/11/2011 and for the next seven days, thousands of people came together (via their intent) at exactly 1:00 pm EDST and spent 20 minutes sending an intention for peace for two specific provinces in southern Afghanistan:  Helmand and Kandahar, chosen because they are strongholds of the Taliban and experience the highest number of casualties. 

It took a long time for Lynn (who has a background, thankfully, as an investigative reporter) to obtain data from military sources, and she reports that there is no globally-centralized repository of information on casualties.  Thus, she has been working to cobble together the information from various military sources around the world. 

While waiting for the military data to come in, Lynn checked with Roger Nelson, director of the Global Consciousness Project, to see if the intention experiment had any demonstrable effect on random event generators (REGs) during the eight days of the experiment.  REGs are machines that put out randomly alternating frequencies of positive and negative pulses . . . rather like a computerized version of a coin toss.   There are 50 REGs around the world.  Historically, large-scale events have registered on the machines, meaning that as human consciousness reacts on a grand scale to positive and negative world events, the machines’ output is no longer random—it is ordered. The REGs showed a small but measurable tendency toward order (rather than their usual randomness) during the 20-minute period of the experiment on all eight days.  A similar result was obtained during Lynn’s 2008 Peace Intention Experiment which targeted the violence in Sri Lanka, leading Roger Nelson to conclude, “This similarity across the two experiments helps support an interpretation of the negative deviations shown in the current dataset as an effect linked to the intention.”  Note that the word “negative” in this context does not mean “bad”—it’s more like tossing a coin many times and having it come up consistently as tails.  See Roger Nelson’s full report here: http://teilhard.global-mind.org/intention.110911-18.html

The military data were then examined for September – December, 2011, and the results are encouraging:

• Attacks with explosive devices dropped 16% compared to the average attack rate for the previous 2+ years
• Civilian casualties dropped an average of 37% after the September experiment
• Overall enemy attacks dropped 12% from October-December, 2011, compared to 2010 levels
• Attacks in the southwest dropped overall by 29% compared to the previous year (this includes a dramatic 790% drop in September 2011, the month in which the intentions were sent)
• Attacks across Afghanistan for all of 2011 were 9% lower than in 2010.

Looking at this data, Lynn points out that the 9/11 Peace Intention Experiment included a specifically quantified intention—they asked that violence be reduced by at least 10%.  Now take a look at the military stats again.

Intentions matter.  Our intent, thoughts, feelings, and assumptions about the world matter.  In fact, they CREATE our world, for better or worse.

“Thought is a creative power.  It makes actual forms in the thought atmosphere around us that affect the way we and others habitually respond to the world.  Thus a knowledge of how the power of thought operates can help us to understand the world around us and to find meaning in life.”   The Power of Thought by John Algeo and Shirley Nicholson (2001).