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The Intention Experiment by Lynne McTaggart Free Press Reviewed by RITA CARTER This review first appeared in The Daily Mail WHAT'S THE BIG IDEA? Everything is interconnected in a vast, mysterious force field and every thought is “tangible energy, with the power to transform”. Hence we can change the world just by thinking. Recently this idea has become known, rather grandly, as “cosmic ordering”, but you probably know it as “positive thinking” or ”mind-over-matter”. There are countless books about it but this one is more ambitious than most because it claims to present a “coherent scientific theory” to explain it. This is brave. Consciousness is known, famously, as the “hard problem” because so far it has defied the understanding of even our greatest minds. McTaggart, however, seems to think she has cracked it. Consciousness is “coherent information” or “ordered energy” – a force that both creates reality and has measurable effects on the material world. In support of her theory she claims a sizeable body of research … shows that thoughts are capable of affecting everything from the simplest machines to the most complex living beings.” What she doesn’t say is that an even more sizeable body of research suggests that there is simply nothing to all these claims. When I was researching my own book about consciousness (Consciousness, Weidenfield and Nicolson 2002). I spent months trying to get to the bottom of this contradiction but it proved impossible. I agree with McTaggart that something very strange is going on, but the evidence doesn’t prove that it is what she thinks it is. SO WHAT'S NEW? Much of this book is a reiteration of McTaggart’s earlier book The Field . One novelty, though, is that it invites readers to take part in a web-based experiment which the author describes as “the largest mind-over-matter experiment in history”. It involves logging on to a website where you are given a precise date and time. When this date and time arrives you stop whatever else you are doing and concentrate for a few moments on altering some event – lowering the temperature in a distant laboratory, for example. The idea is that getting lots of people to beam out the same thought at the same time strengthens its effects. Similar studies have been carried out for decades, but another one is welcome because research of this kind is rarely supported by established institutions and tends not to attract the grants which more orthodox studies rely on. Anything that helps gather data about the effects – or non-effects – of conscious thought is therefore to be encouraged. HOW READER FRIENDLY IS IT? There’s a lot of quasi-scientific terminology and heavy-duty talk about quantum physics but McTaggart is good at explaining complicated phenomena in a clear and lively way. The danger is that her eloquent style will seduce naïve readers into uncritical acceptance of her conclusions. BOFFIN RATING “Straight” boffins will dismiss this book as New Age twaddle but wise ones will keep their mouths shut and their minds open (though not so open that their brains fall out.) © Rita Carter 2007 - www.ritacarter.co.uk |
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