Lynne McTaggart is a journalist and author of five
books in the area of alternative health and consciousness and is well known for her book and newsletters ‘What Doctors Don’t Tell us’. Her book ‘The Field’ tells the story of respected frontier scientists all over the globe who have produced extraordinary evidence to show that an energy field – The Zero Point Field – connects everything in the universe, and we ourselves are part of this vast dynamic cobweb of energy exchange. ‘The Field’ also reveals a radical new biological paradigm – that on the most fundamental level, the human mind and body are not distinct and separate from their environment, but that they are a packet of pulsating energy which is constantly interacting with the surrounding vast sea of energy. The Field is responsible for our mind’s highest functions – our memory, intuition, creativity. It is the force that determines whether we are healthy or ill; the force that must be tapped in order to heal.
Released this year, her latest book – ‘The Intention Experiment’ – explains how human thoughts and intentions are an actual physical something a tangible energy with the astonishing power to affect our world. The Intention Experiment is an exploration of the science of intention and invites the reader to take an active part in its original research.
Long believing in and working with the power of the mind and intention, when I heard that Lynne would be in Holland, I thought it would be a great opportunity to interview her for Feminenza Magazine. Heart Events were organising the Intention Conference which was part of a world wide ‘mind over matter’ experiment. Accompanied by two other scientists, UK’s Alex Ramonsky and Russia’s Konstantin Korotkov, they presented a scientific demonstration of how consciousness can influence the world in which we live. The conference was designed to leave participants without much doubt that each of us is co–creator to the world in which we live.
A week later I had the opportunity to ask Lynne to tell us more about this and her work.
M: What do you feel is the significance of consciousness? Why do you feel consciousness, being conscious, is important?
L: Well, I think we are conscious whether we like it or not. Even people who are asleep are still conscious, as we now know. Even people who are having a near death experience are still conscious. I think it is a fundamental aspect of being alive. I think it is a fundamental aspect of being a living system of any sort. What is important about it is that it is possibly the most essential aspect of our being— being conscious. We are things that know and know that we know. And that it is important to find out, because it transcends time and space. I think it is a real intriguing area for study.
M: You said it is the most essential part of our being?
L: Yes, because it’s the thing that probably connects us more with the Field, it is the thing that connects us with each other. I‘m not sure I can define consciousness. So many people have tried. I suppose consciousness is our sense of unity, it is what unifies us to everything.
M: You talk a lot about the fact that we can affect our surroundings, we can affect the world by our thoughts. Why do you think that is important?
L: Well, it is not that it is important, it is just that it is happening. I don’t even need to put a qualifier on it. We are beaming and sending information all of the time out of our self. We are basically energy. You boil us down to our sub-atomic elements and we are energy, beaming out information all the time and also receiving information all the time from our environment. It is a little two way system going on all the time.
Because this is going on and there is a good deal of evidence to show that thoughts are part of this beaming-out-system, thoughts are beaming out of us all the time and affecting our environment—then it is important to find out how much influence we have and to manage that. Because the worrying thing is, most of us aren’t thinking very good thoughts most of the time. Most of our thoughts aren’t terribly positive.
M: Does your work bring you to the idea of there being some sort of greater intelligence?
L: Well yes. People think of a greater intelligence as being outside of us. And that it is the man with the long beard who sits on a cloud up in the sky. The point of the greater intelligence is that it is all part of us. We are all part of this unity, we are all one with this field, this universal energy field; which I call the Field, the zero point field. If we are part of this, all part of one energy field, then there is no greater intelligence than us. We are the greater intelligence, but we have just been rather stupid at accessing that.
M: Right, so we are the creator in a way.
L: Yes, we are part of …. we call it the co-creator, but we are all part of this creation. You have to try to think of yourself as part of a totality. But yes, we are creators. Consciousness is a creator. Consciousness is a thing that creates. It is part of this totality.
M: Right. So, would you say the whole aspect of personal development or becoming a better person is important in this? If we are all part of one field we are all co-creating, do we need to think about the aspect of developing ourselves?
L: Well yes, I think it is essential to understand and develop a way of doing it well, so that you’re not harming things and that what you’re beaming out all the time is positive messages. And understand the process, and understand how much we do this. So if you understand, then you can do it well. It is fairly evident looking at the world we live in that we’re not doing a very good job of it.
M: Another aspect I would like to talk about is the aspect of the feminine influence. In a way it’s like you have brought all different islands of different researches together in one unity. Do you think that has got anything to do with you being a woman?
L: Well, a lot of scientists do. Someone said once that it’s ironic that the person that could have pulled all this together is me, a woman. I find that gratifying. Certainly a lot of people have made that observation. I feel maybe it is an element of synthesizing; women are great synthesizers. They try to see a broad picture. In a sense I was really their translator. I am the translator of what these people are all doing and I’m trying to communicate it in a way that people can understand as opposed to being the one who is there creating the research in a little corner somewhere. I suppose that might be considered as a feminine role. I like to think it is. It feels like a feminine role because usually I’m having conferences and I’m featuring a lot of these scientists. In the past there have mostly been men and then there’s me. So, it’s quite fun. It’s kind of an interesting reversal I suppose.
I suppose the other thing too that maybe is very feminine is the creation of this community that we’re trying to do on the website with the intention to experiment—getting people to work together to bring the intention to different things. Wanting to show it scientifically, but also creating the community and helping people understand that they can take this and live this in their life; perhaps that’s feminine too.
M: On your living the field website, I find it interesting the section where you promote spirituality in the feminine.
L: Actually it was my husband who thought of that. He’s a real camp follower of spirituality and he has studied everyone. My husband was tired of a lot of these men using their spiritual place and their spiritual power and abusing it, you know for sexual favours or just as a power trip. And he suggested, let’s do something with women. So, I thought it’d be very interesting, with him, to just interview these women, find out about their own spirituality.
So these are feminine teachers, but I wanted to find out, what does spirituality mean to them, how do they bring it into their own life. I just ask questions that everybody wants to ask, like, do they get angry and how do they handle it. Many of these women don’t have children. Do they miss it? Do they have to choose? Why not try to incorporate both, can you incorporate both? And all these questions I wanted to ask them as well as poking at what they do and seeing if there’s any science to explain it. It should be an interesting series; we’re really looking forward to it.
M: What does spirituality mean to you?
L: Spirituality to me is, first of all—I grew up as a Roman Catholic and I didn’t take long to decide that that wasn’t really the right religion for me; I decided that that kind of guilty penance, life is a dress rehearsal, God is something other than you and you are the sinner, it didn’t resonate with me. But I got a sense early on, that what I really wanted to do was to write. And that I wanted to communicate. I wanted to write and communicate hope. So I suppose the elements of my own spirituality are living it through my work and trying to communicate and work for a better society.
It’s a spiritual quest for me in the sense of helping people and giving them hope. I feel that that is a really important calling. I think it is important to have your spirituality incorporated in your work. A lot of people have this spirituality completely divorced from what they do, and in fact they don’t even believe in what they do. They do what they do to make money. And I think that must be very difficult and disconnecting to do that, because it’s hard to put your passion and your great spiritual and transcendent joy into work you fundamentally don’t agree with.
So, I think for me it is very important to try and integrate, and I try to do that in the sense that I’ve always tried to have work answer the questions that I need to answer in my life. So when we started “What Doctors Don’t Tell You,” I needed to know whether or not to vaccinate my firstborn who had just been born. So that was the first question I asked and researched. It’s been something like that. I felt very strongly about bringing up our children in a natural way, and my husband did too, so we created a magazine called “Natural Parent.” And that became kind of spiritual, raising children with a holistic spirit became a very important issue for us.
And then of course the work with the Field, when I was trying to figure out why homeopathy and spiritual healing could work — what kind of paradigm could explain that. And so I ended up going on a quest to find that out and that ended up being “The Field.” And that spun me in a completely new direction. Because I suddenly recognised with this completely new paradigm that was unfolding in science, that we have to look at life very differently.
And so my work for these last years has been to try and understand intention, but also understanding how to make that shift into this new paradigm. What it would mean in your life, how to make it practical. I suppose that’s another feminine thing—to go back to your earlier question—women are really the practical end of the Universe. They’re the ones who have to worry about getting the coats on kids and getting the food shovelled down them and doing all the practical things.
It was important for me to get my feet on the ground with the Field and to say OK, how does this work in work, how does this work in your life, what can we learn from native cultures; how do we bring up our children in the Field, how do we create communities like this. And that became very much our paper course and my seminars, Living the Field.
So I suppose it’s a thing that I’ve been wrestling with… I suppose my spirituality is a working out of these new paradigms and how they manifest themselves spiritually in an integrated life.
M: When you say new paradigm, could you define that?
L: Just the fact that science is a story told by scientists. And that story becomes our reality. We define and we create everything in our reality according to how we believe that the world works. So, the story we have been told is incomplete.
The story we are now told by frontier science is that we’re not individual and separate beings, but we’re all part of this unified energy field and that things affect other things non-locally, across time and space. Many, many things are coming out of the latest understanding of quantum physics that shift our worldview radically and so these structures that we create in our lives, which was a response to an old world view, must change.
So you know we are grappling here. I always say that we are like Columbus without a compass. We are on the verge of this big shift in our understanding of the scientific story and so must all of our ideas about how to create a world, our everyday reality, shift too. That’s what we are all trying to struggle with I think.
M: You speak of your husband often, you obviously work a lot in this together. I find it interesting that you said that he was inspired by the aspect of feminine spirituality.
L: Yes we are a total team. We bounce the ideas back and forth all the time. He thought of a lot of things. He tends to take a philosophical bit and in Living the Field he has written about the philosophy of the Field; he has looked at that because he has a philosophy degree and he is very interested in that.
He is very involved in ”What Doctors Don’t Tell You.”We work together everyday, we’re together 24 hours a day, so we’re very like-minded in this project, which is our company, and in our domestic ‘project’ which is our personal life with our children. So I am very, very grateful and very lucky to have somebody so supportive; he tends to describe himself as the silent partner, but he is pretty good himself and he’s a very, very good writer.
M: The last area I would love to hear you talk about is the area … you have mentioned your motivation. But if you look at motivation in the future, what do you hope will come out of all this?
L: Well I hope people will do nothing less than shift their own paradigm in their life and start living the Field. All the ills in the world relate to our vision of ourselves as separate entities. Everything we can think of in our society is created in that model; in our schools, we have competition and separateness, we teach our children to come first; in our leadership, we have hierarchies in our office, in our work environment we have that, in our countries, and in the globe we feel ourselves alone and separate. And if people could have a real understanding of being part of a unity, that would change everything. I would like people to learn nothing less than a different way to be. I hope that some of the things, the work that I’m doing now and will continue to do in the future, will help people in that journey.
M: Alright, so it is very much to try and help the individual in this?
L: Yes, as well as the collective. But yes, when you’re a writer, readers read you one reader at a time. And I’m very aware of the reader audience as individuals; we now have a very interactive website, so I hear from them all the time, on the news or on the website, and I write back. It’s very much seeing their journey and learning back and forth, because their information informs me and vice versa, I hope. So it’s a real process of two-way feedback. I see there is a process of us all making the shift; it’s not that I’m the teacher and they are the students, because I’m just learning from the science myself. And trying to figure out what something could mean and how it can be interpreted and used in our life, and how we can redesign it according to this paradigm. And what is it going to look like in the future. If we’re not just about being separate maybe we can get rid of countries. There’s a lot of radical things that might happen as a result, in the sense we have got rid of them with the internet.
M: It is interesting coming back on this question of you being a woman. This whole aspect of unity is a very feminine quality, isn’t it?
L: Yes, I think it is. Women aren’t very good at ”I’m bigger than you.” They’re very much about ”Let’s find the common ground here.” What has been fascinating to me in living the Field work has been looking at native cultures; how they handle things. They proceed from a very different paradigm, a paradigm of unity. And even when they look at leadership, they always think of the leader as being there as a kind of servant of people. It’s not like ”I’m on top, I make all the decisions.” And they operate in a very different way, so I’ve been looking at that and I’ve been looking at animals, because animals seem to live in the Field much better than humans do. And trying to learn from all these different qualities. How do you live in unity? I think that that is very much as you say, a feminine quality, because they’re trying to keep a harmonious balance in the family, rather than putting forward power.
And I suppose getting back to your question about why a woman would do this sort of work. I suppose if it were a man it would be somebody who has created the theory rather than e trying to synthesize the work of all these scientists; that might be something very different.
M: Interesting.
L: I think what is interesting too, is that people are now getting tired of messengers only being men. And they’re looking for a lot of different messengers in the feminine voice. I see it in politics, where we might have a few women leaders around the world running things. And now more and more women spiritual leaders are coming into the fore, and people are saying yes, this is a really different message. And I’m really interested in it. It would be very interesting to see if this is the way of the future.
The difficulty is, it is always such a tough situation for women to do that and try to manage everything they want to manage, all at the same time. It is a real juggling act.
M: It is interesting, so many women are coming up front now, like you say, in this time.
L: It may well be that there’s some sort of connection, that the dawn of an age of unity is going to be run by women; that would be nice. (Laughter)
One of the problems with women in business these days is that a lot of women feel, to be good in business you have to be like a man. And a lot of women in business are tougher than men and they feel that they have to do that in order to be successful, because they’re walking into a paradigm and they have to play with boys with boy rules.
What I hope, that is another message too, that we can shift our thinking and say ‘No, it’s OK, we can take the feminine into the work place and it is great, it’s good, it will work .’
You know, one thing we have been saying in the Field, Living the Field course, is the whole idea of trying out really outrageous things. When I was in Amsterdam I had a business dinner that Friday night with about 15 managers and senior managers in business. So it was a really interesting dinner, it was about the Field. But it was also about just looking at the Field in business. One thing we wrote about recently was sharing with your competition and about sharing instead of thinking something different and separate and competitive. If you all work together there is enough for everybody and you can see how you can both win in it. When I talked about this idea of sharing instead of competing, at first they seemed to think it was really strange and then they really got into it and started talking about it and I thought that’s interesting. If people shift their thinking slightly they start to see how that could work and be beneficial for everybody involved.
M: Yes, it’s not necessarily in the big shifts.
L: They’re not big shifts; they’re just shifts of consciousness and shifts of understanding. As I see it, you just have to perceive the basic thing that you’re not separate. If you’re not separate from people, who is there to compete with? Why compete at all? You look at it and then you go back to the way we have structured everything, look what we do in school; we are pushing, pushing, pushing the individual to compete against somebody else. There are winners, there are losers.
Today my child had an egg competition, they all painted eggs at school, because it’s Easter. They all do very elaborate things, parents get very involved with this, they’re very competitive. My daughter walked in, my 10-year-old, and her egg in her mind was not as good as some of the other kids’. She burst out crying. A fine exercise destroyed, because it had become a competition.
Just a slight shift in that, of just saying we are all going to do an egg, and not have a winner and loser; and let’s all beautify the school today, or something like that, just take the competition out of it. You’ve made it a joy without comparison. And thats the problem, we’ve got winners and losers everywhere, and it’s all about separateness.
It’s a slight shift, and a slight shift would mean taking on board the paradigm and just bringing it into your life.
M: Well fantastic, this is a very interesting interview.
L: Oh good! It’s interesting to bring in the feminine thing, because it is not something that I really thought about much. In the sense of I hadn’t really focused on that aspect, until we started thinking about doing this duet with the women in our seminars. But I think it is interesting to think about maybe this paradigm shift moving from women. And maybe how that is going to work. I think it is really interesting to see what’s really going to happen. Of course the most important thing is that the next generation needs to be educated to think this way and not to understand things as being separate. So it’s very important for mothers to be imparting this to the children. We have a whole section in our course about children in the Field and how you educate them, and how you educate them in a very different fashion.
Well, you know, if we are creating a great network, I mean, who are the networkers of the world. Women are the networkers of the world. Women are so great at that. They‘re so great at just reaching out and finding the commonalities.
I was really interested in what my American editor is doing now—a book that is called “The Faith Club;” it’s little groups of women who are getting together who are of different faiths to find their common ground. To stop—as it is happening in America —to stop religious prejudice, and to teach this to our children. I think that is one little aspect of it. And why women could be so brilliant at this is because they’re so good at ignoring the differences, they look. at where we overlap, where our common experience is and that might mean that they find it a lot easier to live the Field.
Copyright Marion Verweij 2007. All rights reserved.
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