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Archive for the ‘Noetic Sciences’ Category

In the first installment of this series, we looked at how REG devices (or Random Event Generators) were used in mind-over-matter experiments. Today we’ll look at the difference in early studies and recent studies that show the difference between focused attention and focused intent.

The experiments at the PEAR lab began in 1979, but physicist and parapsychologist Helmut Schmidt had been using REG devices in consciousness studies since the 1960s. For the most part, all of these studies involved a strictly controlled environment where a person focused their intent on causing the REG device to deviate significantly from random. Many variations on this theme were run including having the person be miles away or focusing their intent long after the REG data had been run and sealed. Regardless of distance or time, the results were still the same. The “intender” had the same effect on the REG as if they had been sitting in the room with it while it was running.

The natural evolution of such studies became what is now the Global Consciousness Project (GCP), which monitors field REG devices all over the world. The data they have archived for the past decade clearly shows a significant shift from random in the REG devices just before a major event happens somewhere in the world.

There are important differences between the PEAR and GCP studies. In the PEAR experiments, the person attempting to affect the device used focused intention. There was a specific goal, or target, that they were trying to achieve. With the GCP study, there is no specific goal and the recorded events are in reaction to an event.

In other words, the PEAR study measured focused intent. The GCP measures focused attention. The PEAR study measured an individual’s intent. The GCP measures global consciousness.

The difference in these studies brings to bear an entirely new aspect to future experiments and helps scientists develop trials that distinguish what type of data they are gathering. This is especially important in studies on energetic healing.

In the next installment, we’ll look at healing studies and why the PEAR and GCP models are inadequate models to show the whole picture of what is transpiring.

The Sage Age – Blending Science with Intuitive Wisdom, was featured in Publishers Weekly shortly after its debut. Visit www.SageAge.net for more information and to read articles on many of the topics covered in the book.

Some of the most famous mind-over-matter experiments were conducted over a twelve year period at the PEAR labs. PEAR is an acronym for Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research. Their experiments centered on a person as the controller who was attempting to influence the behavior of a REG device, which is a Random Event Generator. Basically, a REG acts as the computer equivalent of a coin flipper. Statistically, a coin will land on heads half the time and tails the other half. Instead of heads or tails, a REG spits out 1s and 0s at random with the same statistical split as the coin. (An early REG device is shown to the left.)

The target of the experiment was to get the REG to spit out either more 1s or 0s in a consistent stream, indicating that the events were no longer random. Over the course of the study, scientists were able to acquire enough data to show conclusively that a person could influence a machine.

The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) uses field REG devices placed all over the globe. Some may know it as the EGG Project. Recently they’ve recorded spikes just before the great tsunami that wiped out Indonesia and just before the 9/11 events. Notice that the spikes occurred just prior to the event. (Modern field REG device made by Psyleron shown to the left.)

This means that the GCP brings to light two important aspects of consciousness studies. The first is that focused attention can influence a REG device, even if that is not that target or intention of the ones holding the thought, as it was in the PEAR experiments. The second is that the collective consciousness of humans is aware and reacting to a major event just prior to it actually manifesting in linear time.

There have been many such studies under strictly controlled conditions that all show, irrefutably, that focused attention can affect matter and that awareness can precede an actual event. However, none of these studies reflects the dramatic results of anecdotal evidence displayed with focused intent, especially when there is a sense of urgency or great need between two people who are closely bonded.

In the next installments of this series, we’ll look at the difference in focused attention and intent and why healing with intention experiments are so difficult to conduct.

The Sage Age – Blending Science with Intuitive Wisdom, was featured in Publishers Weekly shortly after its debut. Visit www.SageAge.net for more information and to read articles on many of the topics covered in the book.

In the first installment of this series we delved into one of the real Noetic Science experiments mentioned in The Lost Symbol involving mind-over-matter research using Random Event Generators and how that research evolved into the Global Consciousness Project.

In this installment, we’re going to have a look at the mysterious “Cube” Dan Brown created as the heart of Katherine’s lab.

A real “Cube” does exist. In fact, there are several around the world. They are specially shielded rooms that contain a device called a S.Q.U.I.D., which stands for Super-conducting Quantum Interface Device and is used for such diverse investigations from helping localize pathology in the brain to the measurement of energy being emitted from the hands of healers and Qigong masters.

A S.Q.U.I.D. is so sensitive that the room in which it is used must be heavily shielded from any stray electromagnetic (EM) energy. Basically, this means that no light can enter the room from the outside world. That is precisely why Brown’s character, Katherine, had to traverse a completely dark expanse between her lab and the door that lead to the outside world.

EM radiation comes in many forms including sunlight, lamp light, and any type of broadcast signal such as TV, radio, and cell phones. EM radiation is also present around electrical wires generating AC, which is why Katherine’s lab was powered by hydrogen fuel cells that delivered DC, or Direct Current.

Devices as sensitive as a S.Q.U.I.D. can measure very subtle energies that are giving researchers a way to quantify their existence and their ability to affect matter by conducting experiments that apply the rigors of scientific investigation. However, the data gathered from these experiments has also encouraged many pseudo-science practitioners to claim that we are finally able to measure consciousness, thought, and even finally prove the existence of the subtle energy bodies that surround and permeate the physical body.

Such an arranged marriage of physics and metaphysics is not new. When the EKG was developed to measure the electrical activity surrounding the heart and then refined into an EEG to measure the electrical activity around the brain, similar claims of measuring thought also occurred. In fact, some people, including a few scientists, claimed that these signals proved the existence of telepathy. History is simply repeating itself with the S.Q.U.I.D. And, history clearly shows that every advancement in technology also carries an advancement of the attempt to blend science with mysticism, esoteric knowledge, or intuitive wisdom. (Read more on the evolution of thought on light from both science and intuitives in the article Coming to Terms with Light.)

David Bohm, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, clearly described why we will never be able to measure the subtle energies that reside in the invisible realm he called “the implicate order” that lies outside the manifested, or visible realm he called “the explicate order.” He also clearly described how these subtle energies guide matter and become the resulting data of the experiments we conduct in our search to measure consciousness. (For a little more background on Bohm’s ideas, read the article Dancing to the Same Score – The Particle/Wave Duality of Light.)

The fact that there is a threshold between the invisible and the visible realms has never deterred scientists and engineers from imagining ways to measure what was previously unknown. For instance, radio waves, which are a frequency of light, were always present in our atmosphere. At some point, several folks became convinced of this fact and began a life-long journey of building devices to not only measure them, but to also develop uses for them from a broadcast signal of communication to a way of studying the stars.

At some point, when we get beyond the novelty factor of it, a S.Q.U.I.D. may become as much a standard diagnostic tool as an EKG is today. However, I’m not so sure that any of us will get used to taking that long walk in the dark to get to it.

The Sage Age – Blending Science with Intuitive Wisdom, was featured in Publishers Weekly shortly after its debut. Visit www.SageAge.net for more information and to read articles on many of the topics covered in the book.