In focusing on what Lynne McTaggart calls ‘the field’ and what physics has called the super field or the unified field, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi may come to mind. He described the importance and value of the direct experience of this field when he said, Identification of the human mind with ‘the field’, which is infinitely unified in itself, that is the formula for world peace.
Lynne McTaggart has brought the scientific understanding of this field, which is infinitely unified in itself, to the world in terms that are easily understandable and accessible in her bestselling book The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe.
Lynne is an investigative journalist and award-winning author of five books, including The Field and The Intention Experiment. She also starred in the extended version of the film, What the Bleep Do We Know? Lynne is an internationally recognized spokesperson on the science of spirituality and also co-executive director of Conatus, which publishes the UK’s most well respected health and spiritual newsletters and online information including What Doctors Don’t Tell You.
Lynne runs worldwide Living the Field master classes and groups designed to help people adapt the ideas of the new scientific paradigm into their everyday lives. As co-executive director of Conatus PLC, the UK’s most successful publisher of health newsletters and as an editor of What Doctors Don’t Tell You, she has become an international spokesperson on alternatives to conventional medicine.
Interviewing Lynne was Robert Scheinfeld. Robert is co-author of the New York Times bestseller, Busting Loose from the Money Game. For more than 20 years, Robert has been helping people worldwide create extraordinary results in less time, with less effort and much more fun. You can learn more about Robert Scheinfeld and Busting Loose by going to www.BustingLooseFromTheMoneyGame.com.
ROBERT SCHEINFELD: Since so much of this is about passion, following your passions and such, why don’t we start out with you telling us the role that pursuing your own passions, the things that you care most about, have played in your life?
LYNNE MCTAGGART: Robert, it’s a great question, because I’m one of those strange people who doesn’t really have a career; I have a collection of passions. Passion really propelled me on every journey that I’ve taken in my work. I’ll just start with the mid-80s. I got ill, and one of my first passions was to get better. It was a really huge passion because no one could figure out what was wrong with me.
I went from very orthodox medical doctors to the very outer rim of alternative medicine.
When they couldn’t tell me, I figured out that I was going to have to work this all out for myself. That journey, which ultimately got me better, got me to find the right doctor and helped me to work as a partner in getting myself better. It then transmuted into my first work, which was What Doctors Don’t Tell You.
It’s an international newsletter that looks at what works and what doesn’t work in medicine. In the course of doing that, I kept coming across very good studies of spiritual healing, and I kept wondering to myself, If this is true, if one person can send a thought to someone else and make that person better, then our understanding of the world is incomplete.
My next passion was really to figure out why this could be, and to try to resolve that with the classical scientific story that we’re told. That became, really, my work in ‘the field’. I guess I’m led by my passions more than anything else.
ROBERT SCHEINFELD: Why don’t you tell the listeners the central premise of ‘the field’? You introduced it just now, but maybe you can put a little bit more meat on those bones.
LYNNE MCTAGGART: The premise of ‘the field’? When I started talking to frontier scientists, I assumed that there would be a ready-made model out there for me; that I could just talk to them and they would lay it all out, and that would explain to me why things like homeopathy and spiritual healing work. I found, to my astonishment-I guess to my horror, too-that each of them had one little patch of information.
Scientists are told to not really venture outside of their experiment or their own little theories to look at the big picture. I soon realized that I was going to have to be the one who put together the big picture, and that was pretty daunting for me, because I’m not a scientist. However, many of them were talking about one thing that was really important, which was the idea that we are not a collection of static objects operating according to tidy little laws in time and space.
We’re all part of an interconnection. We’re all part of, basically, a relationship with each part affecting the whole at every moment. This whole was a giant unified quantum energy field. What’s really important about that-indeed, what’s most important about that-of course, has to do with a couple of implications. One is the fact that we’re all connected. That is, as I say, completely contrary to what ordinary science tells us about ourselves, which is that we exist separately.
Secondly, each part is affecting the whole at every moment, so we’re having effects and being affected all the time. As Einstein put it, ‘the field’ is the only reality. The relationship is the only reality. Finally, ‘the ‘field’ is an actual entity, a zero point field, which is an encoder of information. ‘The field’ is, in a sense, a giant tape recorder of all the information that ever was. We, as an intrinsic part of that, have access to all the information at any moment. The implications of all of that are pretty huge.
ROBERT SCHEINFELD: Briefly tie it back to how you got into it in the first place, about the whole spiritual healing and homoeopathy thing. Can you give us a quick overview, now that we have an understanding of what this field is? I’m jumping a little bit ahead of something I think we’re going to discuss later, but we’ve laid that foundation. How does it support things like spiritual healing, homeopathy, and such having the kind of results that they do?
LYNNE MCTAGGART: Think of it as a great big telephone network. Everybody is on the phone all at the same time. If you are connected at that nether-most level of your being, then you have the ability; a thought of yours has an ability to affect someone else because you are tied into them, basically. Homeopathy is a little more complicated only in the sense that it has to do with water and memory.
Homeopathy has always been debunked by ordinary science. They say all you do with homeopathy is take a substance and dilute it so much in water that none of the original molecules remain, so that can’t work. That’s according to conventional science; but the whole premise of homeopathy is that water is like a tape recorder that retains a memory of those molecules, and that’s how it can work.
Physicists have demonstrated that this is definitely the case. There are many Italian physicists and others who now realize that water does act like a tape recorder. It has a thing called coherent domain, and so it collects that information. The real fine point here is that what’s giving a substance its power and its information is a quantum frequency, and that’s what’s going on and being recorded in the memory of water.
That is really the smallest part of us, our signature information flow, rather than chemical as we’re told. There was a phrase when I was growing up, and I think it was ‘Better living through chemistry’. We always think of ourselves as chemical entities, but we’re actually energetic entities, and the information we send and receive is via frequencies.
ROBERT SCHEINFELD: Would it be fair to say, then, that the reason all of this kind of stuff-or other stuff we call intuition and such-works or is made possible is ultimately the movement of energy or information through this gigantic field?
LYNNE MCTAGGART: Absolutely, and we’re able to tap into it. What we call weird, like ESP, where one person supposedly transmits information to someone else is always there. We’re just tapping into it. We get it and we can achieve that instantaneously.
ROBERT SCHEINFELD: The opening chapter of The Field describes the experience of Ed Mitchell on Apollo 14. Why don’t you share with the audience that story and why you used it to begin the book?
LYNNE MCTAGGART: I used it to begin the book basically for dramatic reasons. I was trying to figure out how to structure this book so I could keep people interested. I’m a writer and a journalist first and foremost, so I’m always thinking about how to keep my readers entertained. I realized that when you start talking about quantum physics, that’s a pretty easy way of putting people to sleep.
I felt very strongly that I didn’t want to write this in an ordinary expository way. I wanted to write it as a narrative. I wanted to tell the stories of the scientists and to, more of less, sneak the science in so that people wouldn’t notice. I would build the theory through them in loop-the-loop fashion, so I was trying to figure out the central glue of all of this. Interestingly enough, Edgar Mitchell was.
Ed Mitchell was one of those people early on who had this extraordinary experience, and then spent the rest of his life trying to figure out what on earth had happened to him. This is the story. He was supposed to be on Apollo 13, and luckily was bumped. He got on Apollo 14; on the way home, he was looking out of the module toward earth, and he had this extraordinary epiphany.
He had this sense of being completely interconnected, of his molecules reaching out to the furthest reaches of the cosmos. It was this extraordinary feeling of unity. As I say, he came back and wanted to figure out what on earth went on out there, so he spent the rest of his life using his celebrity to find this. He, of course, founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which does a great deal of investigation and research into the so-called paranormal, and consciousness and extraordinary experiences like that.
I think what’s really important about Ed’s story is that it more or less demonstrates this unity. He had a real visceral experience of what all of us are actually having all the time, but he’s just become conscious of it. He had a huge experience like that. Many, many people describe something similar to that, and we all in a sense can have that experience. We can all live in ‘the field’ when we become conscious.
ROBERT SCHEINFELD: This is a gigantic question, but it comes up, and I’m sure will come up in the minds of some of the audience, if not all of them. Give us a brief sketch, if you would, of how you see the relationship between what scientists call ‘the field’ and what religions call God.
LYNNE MCTAGGART: That is the big question, Robert! The short answer to that is I think ‘the field’ is what religion calls God. What’s interesting about ‘the field’ is that it’s an actual entity. That’s what I like about it. A lot of people talk about the unified field, the matrix, the source, or any one of a number of things, but the zero point field is an actual thing that quantum physicists have long known exists.
However, they’ve more or less discounted it because using ‘the field’ messes up their equation. I’ll tell you why. ‘The field’ is basically composed of the energetic interplay between subatomic particles. All subatomic particles pass back and forth energy, like an endless game of basketball. They pass a little energy to another particle, and in that pass a thing called a virtual particle gets created. It’s there for much less than the blink of an eye.
There’s not much energy between two particles, but when you start calculating all the energy going on between subatomic particles in all the things in all the universe, you come up with this unbelievable, unfathomable amount of energy sitting there in empty space, almost like a supercharged backdrop. Everyone has known this goes on, but because it’s composed of this ephemeral energy, basically, when physicists go to do their math equations they end up with infinities.
They can’t round off their decimal points, so they have tended to subtract out the zero point field when they’re working on equations about motion, et cetera. When they do that, in my mind, it’s a bit like subtracting out the most important part. As I said in my book, it’s a little like subtracting out God. For me, the alpha and omega of existence, the thing that ties us all together at our lowest, most basic level is this quantum energy field. In a sense, it is the source.
I think when many religions talk about God they don’t necessarily describe a man sitting on a cloud with a long white beard. They describe an ineffable source, and this could go along with it. When people ask me if ‘the field’ is counter to religion, I always say no. ‘The field’ is the beginning of a scientific proving of God, a scientific proving of religion. Call it what you will, many ancient cultures have talked about a basic animatory principle that is very much like a field. Virtually all native cultures and many, many traditional cultures and ancient cultures have all believed in something akin to ‘the field’.
ROBERT SCHEINFELD: Let me ask you another question. Again, this is a biggie, but we’re going to do our best throughout the interview to sketch this out. There is so much stuff in history about all of us being one and in unity; there are metaphors of putting a drop of water in the ocean, and the minute it drops back in the ocean it merges back into the whole, and all these kinds of things.
Share with the audience what you have been able to gather and get clarity on in terms of how everything in our day-to-day lives can appear to be so separate, and yet we’re being told that isn’t separate at all. It’s really all unified.
LYNNE MCTAGGART: There are a lot of answers to that question, but I’ll try to be brief. One of the first reasons is that not every culture experiences the world as separate. We do because that’s what we’re told. I think, for me, one of the main reasons that we experience it as separate is because we are told that’s how we work. We’re told that’s how the world works. We have a certain experience of science, a certain understanding of the way we are as a separate entity with just five senses.
We discard other kinds of things that would create a bigger picture. A lot of ancient cultures don’t experience the world like that. They experience the world very differently, and they understand themselves as being connected to every living thing. They experience themselves as being connected to a speck of dirt. It’s not something they have to tell themselves. Their brain is actually hardwired to see that. I think the first answer is because we’re given a certain scientific story.
That story tells and emphasizes our separation, so we experience ourselves with this sort of false self. The other reason is because we, in a sense, create time and space through our understanding. I believe that we experience our world, and we create that, in moving ourselves through the world. We have to, in a sense, move beyond our limited understanding of the world to a deeper understanding and start recognizing the connection, and there are many.
ROBERT SCHEINFELD: Being really brief about it, with a 50-foot-up kind of perspective, the reason everything appears so separate when it’s not is because we’ve convinced ourselves that it’s that way?
LYNNE MCTAGGART: I think so. Yes, I think that’s the short answer.
ROBERT SCHEINFELD: In some of the stuff that you talk about in the book that the quantum scientists are researching, it talks about ‘the field’ being infinitely correlated. Can you explain what that means?
LYNNE MCTAGGART: Yes. It has to do with non-locality. Non-locality sounds like a really complicated idea, but it’s really simple if you think of it this way. All subatomic particles, once they bump into each other, in a sense, become correlated. By correlated they mean that it’s a little bit like twins separated at birth. If you take one and move him to New York and the other one to London and they never see each other again-let’s say they’re boys-they’ll grow up and both marry a woman named Jane.
They’ll both love the color blue, and if one falls down and breaks his leg while he’s skiing, the other one will break his leg even though he’s sitting there sipping a cup a coffee at Starbucks. It’s that kind of instant correlation, instant effect, of one on the other over any kind of time or distance instantly. That’s what goes on. That’s what defies ordinary physics, this kind of non-local connection that occurs instantaneously and defies the whole Einsteinian notion that nothing happens faster than the speed of light.
This, of course, does. All subatomic particles, as I say, once they’ve bumped into each other create this non-local connection, and scientists are discovering these kinds of correlations all through ‘the field’. They’re also finding non-locality within us in relation to other living things. They’re finding non-locality all over the place, but here’s the really bizarre thing about it.
Scientists used to make this big distinction between the physics of the small and the physics of the large. The physics of the large is the well-behaved universe we think we know, which is how things happen. If you’re going to affect something else, you’ve got to do something physical to it. You’ve got to throw it, drop it, freeze it, or give it a good, swift kick. In some way you have to do something physical to something else to affect it or change it.
They’re now realizing and beginning to find that the physics of the small, which were the weird, anarchic quantum things like non-locality, are actually present in the world of the big visible stuff, in the big sticks-and-stones world we know. For instance, scientists at University of Chicago have discovered non-local connections in atoms and molecules. This probably doesn’t like too much of a big deal, but in science terms this is huge.
It means these things, which are the visible building blocks of nature are now evidencing these non-local connections. That suggests to us that non-locality isn’t just a feature of the quantum world, but a feature of the world at large. Up until now, as I say, physicists have believed that subatomic particles-and this is the thing that sounds so counterintuitive to ordinary folks like you and me-act in this weird Alice-in-Wonderland way when they’re just subatomic.
However, when they suddenly become part of a larger whole-part of molecules, atoms, and even bigger things like human tissue-they start behaving themselves and acting according to classical laws of physics. Now they’re finding that’s not true, that non-locality is present all over the place in big stuff, too.
ROBERT SCHEINFELD: It’s also what makes possible so many of what I refer to as cool paranormal effects, including the non-locality thing, and like you mentioned, spiritual healing, where it can be affected with somebody across the world, where distance doesn’t matter. They can still have impact on somebody else. All the intention stuff that you’re doing is one of the most exciting aspects of the whole thing.
LYNNE MCTAGGART: Absolutely. It makes perfect sense now. We now have the physics to explain all those unexplainable things. ‘The field’, for me, was a wonderful way, a mechanism, to explain all those unexplainable things like ESP, remote viewing, near-death experiences, and all sorts of things. It demonstrates that in a sense this is a memory bank of consciousness. It means that we can be in touch with anything and be affecting anything at any moment.
ROBERT SCHEINFELD: People are always talking about and debating the topic of free will and how much control we have over what happens to us day to day in these kinds of things. You have referred to ‘the field’ as being an entity. In what you have researched and studied, and with the clarity you have, do you feel that ‘the field’ itself has volition? Does it have and express desires? Does it have impact over what happens to us as some sort of a separate entity?
LYNNE MCTAGGART: What a question! I don’t pretend to completely understand what ‘the field’ has, but I would say that ‘the field’ is not so much of a volition and a desired thing. I think ‘the field’ is the summation of experience, in a sense, and we move through our lives. In other words, we give information back to ‘the field’. I think ‘the field’ is a repository of consciousness. Whether or not that means that it itself has volition, I don’t know. I would say not. I would say it’s a repository of experience.
ROBERT SCHEINFELD: It supports the creation of the experiences that we want to have, ultimately.
LYNNE MCTAGGART: Yes, but maybe there is only consciousness. Maybe it’s not consciousness in ‘the field’. I had a long discussion with one of the scientists, Robert John, and both of our brains were getting quite warped trying to think ourselves around that point.
ROBERT SCHEINFELD: So much of that creates that kind of an effect from my experience, I’ll tell you. If you really study the science of ‘the field’ and a lot of stuff that’s in the book, it gets very technical, very complex. It can be tricky sometimes. We’ve talked a little bit about it, but it can get tricky sometimes.
You say, Fine. I acknowledge that this is here, that there are these subatomic particles, this non-locality, and all this other stuff, but what does this mean to me in a practical way living my own day-to-day life? Can you shed some support for the listeners in terms of the practical value in their life from knowing that all of this is going on and that this field exists?
LYNNE MCTAGGART: Absolutely. I think there are a couple of things here that are really exciting. First of all, and this is what was most important for me, it’s a mechanism for explaining so many of the experiences that we all have. For instance, you pick up the phone and the person on the other end of the phone, whom you haven’t talked to for three years, is the person you thought it was. That kind of precognitive experience, so many of us have experienced; or, having a dream that comes true.
Here’s a mechanism to explain it, but I think the biggest implication for me, which led to my next passion, which was The Intention Experiment, was the implication that consciousness has the ability to affect physical matter. That came through loud and clear with many of the studies that I reported on in The Field, but it was a lot of leftover business. I really wanted to find out something practical about it, as you say. How far can we go here? What can we do with this outside of the laboratory?
Can I help my children automatically pass their tests by thinking about it? Can I fly up on my roof and fix my satellite dish with my thoughts? Most importantly, can I do anything to affect the catalog of suffering out there with my thoughts? I wanted to find out exactly what we could do, so I made a passion of it and I wrote another book called The Intention Experiment.
In that book I not only put together the science of intention, but I put together an ongoing experiment just to test this thing to find out what we can do with this. What can people do individually? I wanted to create little groups of people to find out what people can do individually. Does the effect magnify with a group? The short answer to that is yes; absolutely it does.
I wanted to find out if distance was an issue or if time was an issue. Certainly, we found with our Intention Experiment thus far that it doesn’t matter where we do them; we have an effect.
ROBERT SCHEINFELD: Are you aware of specific techniques-I’ll just use that word and I’m sure you’ll know what I mean-that people can use to access or directly experience ‘the field’?
LYNNE MCTAGGART: Yes. Again, I always approach everything as a journalist, so to find out I started thinking about who would know how to use ‘the field’. Who would know how to use intention? I interviewed many different kinds of intention masters, Qigong masters, master healers, Buddhist monks and Native American shaman just to see what kinds of techniques they use to get into a state of being able to affect matter.
There are people who are super-intenders, and they all had different techniques, but it boiled down to certain basic commonalities. I took all of that and distilled that into a very simple program that I call Powering Up. The state that people are in when they send intentions isn’t a state of quiet, a calmed-down state. It’s not, per se, a classic meditative state, although it starts with meditations. It’s a much more hyped-up state where they’re intending with every bone of their bodies.
I felt that it was, in a sense, like they enter hyperspace and they are using all of their five senses. That is part of the little program that I put together, a mechanism for achieving that kind of very focused state. I also looked at heart states and the fact that they’re sending intention through the heart. It’s not a mind state; it’s a heart state, too. Other things, like being specific about using a particular place, choosing an intention space, were important.
Besides these intention-master practices, I looked at what was working in the laboratory. There was one very interesting thing that was happening when intention experiments and healing studies were being carried out in certain labs. After a while, they would begin to work faster and better if carried out in the same lab. From that and other evidence too, I inferred that it’s important to send intention from the same place all the time, to choose your intention space.
There are many things like that; there is even such a thing as the right time. I try to go through all of that. I also spent a great deal of time after the book came out studying, learning and working out a whole program for living with intention and Living The Field. I had many thousands of readers write to me and say, I love the book, but how do I live this? That’s always a terrible question to ask a journalist!
Four years, 48 parts, 768 pages, and something like 1.5 million words later, my husband and I answered the question. We started studying all kinds of cultures, animals, different philosophies, and all manner of things, plus science to try to work out how you live ‘the field’. I have a whole big program that looks at that and teaches how to bring this into your life in many different ways.
ROBERT SCHEINFELD: Where would people get information on that?
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For more information about Lynne McTaggart and her work, please go to http://www.livingthefield.com/.
