Lynne McTaggart: The Power of Eight
So, he was depressed, but when he was in that group, he didn’t feel that he should get the intention for his depression. He felt that one of the other people who had cancer was more deserving. So, he just sent intention to her, as everyone else did. By the way, her cancer went from stage four to stage one now.
But, Wes had an amazing epiphany. I talked to him a few days later. He said, “my God, I woke up, and everything is so changed.” “The grass is greener than it’s ever been, the flowers smell sweeter, getting up is so easy now, doing any activity is so easy now. I spoke to him a few months after that, and suddenly, I heard he was doing power walking for 90 minutes, he was lifting weights. He said I feel like I’m in my 20s, not my 60s now.
He had a dream that he’d met his 19-year-old self and somehow communicated to him there’s still time. And Wes is a really changed person, and yet the intention wasn’t about him. It was about sending to someone else, and that was the big powerful thing for him.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Did you experiment with groups of six or 12 to see whether there was something magic about eight?
Lynne McTaggart: Eight is kind of an ideal number, and a lot of people have said they feel it works better with eight. I don’t have any hard data to say that, and I certainly didn’t use eight because of any sacred geometry or the idea that eight is a sideways infinity and all of those wonderful things. That’s just something, to impose on it. It was just an accident. At least, that’s what it seemed to be. But, what I found is eight is a Goldilocks number in the sense that it’s not too few and it’s not too many. I would say anything, if you have smaller than five, it’s not enough, and more than 12, it starts getting a little unwieldy.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Lynne McTaggart, I’ve been a follower of your work since the very early days when you first released the What Doctors Don’t Tell You Newsletter back, years and years ago in England. So, I’ve read every single one of your books, and, I’ve been really interested in following your work.
So, when I met Bill Tiller some years ago, and I know Bill has also done some work with intention, I introduced him to a friend of mine who was working with the higher consciousness of autistic children, and Bill and Suzy Miller set up the Autism Intention Experiment. He was broadcasting it through one of the unimprinted intention devices that he imprinted with an intention. The night before they started the broadcast, Suzy Miller was getting calls from those practitioners telling her of the miraculous things that were happening with those autistic children. What happens before you broadcast your intentions? Are they being put into a field of grace or peace or, something is happening to them on some level just by the very fact that they’re spending the time creating that intention?
Lynne McTaggart: Well, I think what’s happening is probably a bit of everything. There is the power of intention and collective intention. There is the power of the group and the collective, effects of the group. There’s Emile Durkheim, the French psychologist, once called it collective effervescence. When people come together in a group, something magical happens.
But, there’s also the power of altruism. And I really looked at this in detail. the science of altruism is quite amazing. Altruism is like a bulletproof vest. People who do things for other people and that would include thinking well for them, trying to heal them, live longer, are healthier, are happier in every regard.
Also, there’ve been really interesting. One amazing prayer study where a psychologist who also happened to be a priest in Berkley, California wanted to try to see if prayer could work for mental illness because there’s plenty of evidence showing prayer has worked in some studies for physical illness. So, he got a group of 400 volunteers who had depression, who had clinical depression, and he got them together, and he divided the group in half. One half was going to get the praying, and the other half was going to give the praying.
Now, the people who got the prayer, afterward he then measured them, to see whether there were any improvements according to all kinds of psychological parameters. The people who got the prayer did well. They were improved but not as improved as the people who gave the prayer.
And that has been demonstrated over and over in these small intention groups. One year, 2015, I wanted to really study how these things worked and why. So, I decided to put together 250 people who would be part of an intention master class, a year-long project where I would teach them over six teleseminars and then put them into small groups of eight, about eight, and then monitor everything going on with them for an entire year. And I looked at their health, their relationships, their finances, their career, their life’s purpose and month on month to month.
Now, we had extraordinary stories. Of the 250 people, about 150 continued to meet regularly in their group over the year and beyond. Now, of those 150, pretty much 100 percent of them had major life changes of some sort. Some guy with chronic depression discovered the cause of it. He’d had lifelong depression, and it was difficult because he was a clinical psychologist, but an integrated psychologist. So, he tried everything, and nothing worked.He discovered with his group, when his group sent intention for him to find the cause of this depression, he discovered one of his liver filtration systems wasn’t working. And once that was sorted, he was sorted, and the depression lifted.
We had another woman with 15 years’ worth of chronic fatigue, could barely exercise for five minutes. She’s now lifting weights and going hiking.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Do you define a difference between intention and prayer?
Lynne McTaggart: I think the intention is more focused. I think prayer tends to be being a supplicant, saying, God, you decide, thy will be done, whatever you decide. With intention, it’s a little more focused. It’s still a request, but it usually is a very specific request to the universe. So, there’s a lot of overlapping elements to it. It’s just slightly different.
Sandie Sedgbeer: I guess, too, there’s the factor that, with intention, you are being the creator rather than relying on someone else to be a creator.
Lynne McTaggart: Yes, you are, but let me define that, too. Instead of God being another, you are kind of acknowledging the God within you, that ability to create. There is a big spiritual component to it, particularly when you see how powerful these Power of Eight groups are.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Did you find in your experiments that the skill level of people had any effect on the outcome?
Lynne McTaggart: Yeah, I think people who were more practiced and skillful, experience counted. With that seed experiment, the biggest outcome occurred among healing touch practitioners when I spoke in front of them. The seeds grew twice as high as the controls, the seeds intention.
And I think experience does count. Certain techniques do count, the right heart state, the right mind state, that ability to focus on the other, the ability to focus full stop, a very focused, energized mind state. All of those things are the kinds of things I talk about in my program Powering Up that’s in my book The Power of Eight and that I teach in my master classes.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Are you also finding that the more practiced a group gets, the stronger the effects?
Lynne McTaggart: Oh, yeah. I think after I watch my year-long intention master classes. When people do get to be intention masters, They do learn how to really focus their intention, how to get off of themselves, how to phrase their intentions, how to be very specific, the kind of mindsets and heart states, to get into – all of those things really make a difference.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Lynne McTaggart, looking back over your body of work, there’s a clear pathway running through all of your books from The Field, which reveals that the human mind and body are not separate from their environment. The Bond which demonstrates we’re in a constant relationship with everything and everyone. The Intention Experiment, which demonstrates that thought’s a thing that affects other things and now with The Power of Eight, which, provides solid evidence that we can harness the power of intention to help one another. You’ve said that it, has transformed you from a hard-nosed journalist and a skeptic to a believer, where’s it going? I mean, what’s the next step for you?
Continue to Page 3 of the Interview with Lynne McTaggart
