PROJECT COHERENCE: MAKING A BETTER WORLD
We are living in a time of extremes, and these extremes are both a reflection of an old consciousness that can no longer survive and a future consciousness in which planet Earth herself, and all of us on Earth, are transforming. This old consciousness is driven by survival emotions like hatred, violence, prejudice, anger, fear, suffering, competition, and pain—emotions that serve to seduce us into believing we are separate from one another. The illusion of separation taxes and divides individuals, communities, societies, countries, and Mother Nature herself. The mindlessness, carelessness, greed, and disrespect of human activity is threatening life as we know it. By pure logic and reason, this type of consciousness cannot sustain itself for much longer.
Because everything is moving toward extreme polarities, undeniably many of the current systems—whether political, economic, religious, cultural, educational, medical, or environmental—are being pulled apart as antiquated paradigms collapse. We can see this most prominently in journalism, where no one knows what to believe anymore. Some of these changes reflect people’s choices, while others reflect increasing levels of personal awareness. One thing is apparent, however; in this age of information, everything that is not in alignment with the evolution of this new consciousness is coming to the surface.
If you aren’t aware that there is an increase in frequency and energy occurring at this time—an increase in anxiety, tension, and passion—then you might not be paying attention to your own state of being and mankind’s interconnectedness to this energy. In addition to the upheavals in our highly charged political, social, economic, and personal environments, many people also feel as if time is speeding up—or that more momentous happenings are occurring in a shorter amount of time. Depending on your outlook, this could be either an exciting time of awakening or an anxiety-inducing moment in history. Regardless, the old must fall away or break down so that something more functional can emerge in its place. This is how people, species, consciousness, and even the planet itself evolve.
This excitement in energy both within humans and nature begs several questions: Could greater influences be at play that are affecting mankind’s correlation to violence, war, crime, and terrorism—and conversely, peace, unity, coherence, and love? And is there a reason why all of this is happening at this particular time?
The History of Peace-Gathering Projects
To date, the power of temporary peace-gathering projects has been exhibited and thoroughly field tested in more than 50 demonstration projects and 23 peer-reviewed scientific studies scrutinized by independent scholars around the world.1 The results have consistently demonstrated a positive effect in the immediate reduction of crime, warfare, and terrorism by an average of greater than 70 percent.2 Think about that for a moment. When a group of people come together with the specific intention or collective consciousness to change some “thing” or to produce an outcome, if they create it with the energy and emotions of peace, unity, or oneness—without physically doing anything—that unified community can produce changes 70 percent of the time. To quantify the results of these studies, scientists use a measurement called lead-lag analysis.
The purpose of lead-lag analysis is to uncover correlations between people and incidents. For example, if you looked at the lead-lag analysis of a chain-smoker, it would show that the more a person smokes, the greater chance they will have of developing lung cancer. In relation to peace-gathering projects, the studies have found that the greater the number of meditators or peace gatherers (combined with the amount of time they meditate), the greater influence the gathering has upon decreasing incidences of crime and violence in society.
A powerful example is the Lebanon peace project, which brought together a group of meditators in Jerusalem in August and September of 1983 to demonstrate the “radiating influence of peace.” Although the number of meditators fluctuated over time, it was often large enough to achieve the super radiance effect for both Israel and nearby Lebanon. This effect happens when a group of specially trained meditators come together at the same time on a daily basis to create and radiate a positive effect on society. The results of the two-month study showed that on days when there was a high participation of meditators, a 76 percent reduction of war deaths occurred. Other effects included reduced crime and fires, decreased traffic accidents, less terrorism, and increases in economic growth. The results were then replicated in seven consecutive experiments over a two-year period during the peak of the Lebanon war.3 All of this was achieved simply by combining people’s intention for peace and coherence with the elevated emotions of love and compassion. This clearly demonstrates that the more unified the consciousness of a group of people within a specific elevated energy is, the more it can change the consciousness and the energy of others in a nonlocal way.
In what’s considered one of the top three peace-gathering studies in the Western hemisphere, a RAND Corporation think tank assembled a group of nearly 8,000 (and sometimes more) trained meditators to focus on world peace and coherence during three periods ranging from 8 to 11 days each, from 1983 to 1985. The results showed that during this time, worldwide terrorism was reduced by 72 percent.4 Can you imagine the results and positive effects, as well as the speed with which they would occur, if this type of meditation and mindfulness was a part of the education curriculum?
In still another study, this time in India from 1987 to 1990, 7,000 people gathered to focus on world peace. During that three-year period, the world witnessed remarkable transformations toward world peace: The Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall came down, the Iran-Iraq war came to an end, South Africa began to move toward abolishing apartheid, and terrorist attacks subsided. What surprised everyone was the swiftness with which these global changes occurred, all in a relatively peaceful manner.5
In 1993, from June 7 to July 30, approximately 2,500 meditators gathered in Washington, D.C., in a highly controlled experiment to focus on peace and coherent energy. For the first five months of the year, violent crime had been steadily on the rise, yet soon after the study began, a significant statistical reduction in violence (as measured by FBI Uniform Crime Reports), crime, and stress in Washington, D.C., began to occur.6 These results point to the fact that a relatively small group of people united in love and purpose can have a statistically significant effect on a diverse population.
On September 11, 2001, due to the immediacy of global media, human beings all over the planet felt horror, shock, fear, terror, and grief as planes crashed into New York City’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. In an instant, the world’s collective consciousness tuned in to this event. Powerful emotional outpourings around the globe occurred as people bonded, formed communities, and took care of one another.
During the unfolding of events on 9/11, scientists at Princeton University’s Global Consciousness Project were collecting data via the Internet from more than 40 devices around the world. As data poured in to a central server in Princeton, New Jersey, the scientists witnessed dramatic changes in the patterns in their random event generator. (Think of a random event generator as a computerized coin toss. It’s measuring heads or tails, or ones and zeros, so according to statistics it should produce nearly 50/50 results.) The dramatic changes in patterns right after the event caused the scientists to determine that the collective emotional response of people’s outpouring was enough that it could actually be measured in the Earth’s magnetic field.7
What all of these studies ultimately point to is that there’s significant evidence that group meditations of the right size with skilled meditators who change their emotions and energy can influence and create nonlocal, measurable effects on peace and global coherence. If these peace-gathering projects are a force for coherence throughout a society, are there antithetical forces that could be working against humans to produce incoherence?
The Earth’s Relationship to Solar Cycles
As the Earth rotates daily on its axis, every morning the sun brings light to the darkness, warmth and comfort to the chill of night, photosynthesis to plants, and security to humans. It’s for this reason that as far back as 14,000 B.C.E., adoration of the sun has been sketched onto stone tablets and cave walls. Countless mythologies (including civilizations in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Mayans and the Aztecs, and the Australian Aborigines, to name just a few) have extolled the sun as worthy of worship, as well as a source of enlightenment, illumination, and wisdom. No matter the location, most cultures have recognized the sun as the prime controller of all life on Earth because without it, life here could not exist.
For the most part humans are electromagnetic beings (entities that constantly send and receive messages via vibrational energies) whose bodies are made up of gravitationally organized light and information. (In fact, everything material in this three-dimensional world is gravitationally organized light and information.) Just as we are individual electromagnetic beings, we are but a small link in the chain of an electromagnetic world, the individual parts of which cannot be separated from the whole.
On a grand scale, it is impossible to deny the interconnectivity between the sun’s energy, the Earth’s energy, and the energy of all living species. On a micro level, all you have to do is look at the life cycle of a fruit or vegetable to understand this interdependence. The vegetable or fruit begins as a seed, and when environmental conditions such as water, temperature, nutrient-rich soil, and photosynthesis conspire, these conditions enable the seed to germinate. Eventually the blossom of the seed becomes an integral part of an ecosystem, as well as a source of sustenance and nourishment for various forms of life. This complex chain and delicate balance of events all begins with the Earth’s uniquely situated location in our solar system. Known as the circumstellar habitable zone, this is a range of orbital distance around a star (our sun) in which a planet can support liquid water.
While the sun may be almost 93 million miles away, when it becomes active it has significant consequences to life on Earth because the Earth and the sun are related by electromagnetic fields. The purpose of the Earth’s electromagnetic field (see Figure 13.1) is to protect it from the harmful effects of solar radiation and sunspots, cosmic rays, and other forms of space weather. Although not totally understood, sunspots are relatively dark, cool areas of the sun caused by interactions within the sun’s magnetic field; they can be up to 32,000 miles in diameter. You can think of sunspots as a cap on a seltzer bottle; if you shake the bottle and then remove the cap, it’s going to produce a large release of photons (light) and other forms of high-frequency radiation.8
The Earth’s electromagnetic field.
If it were not for the protection and insulation of Earth’s electromagnetic fields, life as we know it could not exist, for we would be constantly bombarded by a steady stream of deadly particles. For example, when there are solar flares, the Earth’s electromagnetic field protects the planet by deflecting trillions of tons of photonic emissions called mass coronal ejections. Mass coronal ejections are huge explosions of plasma and magnetic fields from the sun’s corona that can extend millions of miles into space. Their effects tend to reach the Earth an average of 24 to 36 hours after they occur.
These ejections compress the Earth’s field, heating the Earth’s iron core. As this core becomes altered, it changes the planet’s electromagnetic field. These ejections are a part of solar cycles that occur approximately every 11 years—and they have the potential to disturb all living organisms on the Earth.
The recording of solar cycles began in 1755, but in 1915 an 18-year-old Russian boy named Alexander Chizhevsky took mankind’s understanding of the sun and its relation to the Earth to the next level when he spent his summer observing our sun. During that summer he began hypothesizing that periods of solar activity might have effects on the organic world. A year later he entered World War I, and when not fighting for Russia, he again cast his observations toward the sun. He noticed in particular that battles tended to wax or wane depending on the strength of solar flares (see Graphic 14 in the color insert).9 Chizhevsky later compiled the histories of 72 countries from 1749 to 1926, comparing the annual number of important political and social events (such as the start of wars, revolutions, outbreaks of diseases, and violence) with increased solar activity, demonstrating a correlation between the sun’s activity and human excitability. Equally interesting, solar activity has also been associated with great human flourishing, including innovations in architecture, science, the arts, and social change.10
Every place where you see the red line spiking in the graphic represents an active solar flare or sunspot that occurred between the years 1750 and 1922. The blue lines represent historically important events that took place within the same period. Chizhevsky eventually determined that 80 percent of these countries’ most significant events occurred during solar events and geomagnetic activity.11 The solar release of energy—which is always carrying information—seems to be in almost perfect coherence with the activities, the energy, and the consciousness of our planet. It just so happens that at the time of this writing, in 2017, we are in the midst of a very active solar cycle.
In the past decade, much has been said about how this solar energy is affecting the planet and all of life that inhabits it. In 2012, doomsayers thought the end of the Mayan calendar, which correlates to the December solstice, meant the end of the world was at hand. Today astrologers talk about the Age of Aquarius (an astrological age is a period consisting of approximately 2,150 years that corresponds to the average time it takes for the vernal equinox to move from one constellation of the zodiac into the next) and how it will usher in a new awareness for humanity. Astronomers and cosmologists talk about galactic alignment, a rare astronomical event occurring every 12,960 years that brings the sun into alignment with the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
Regardless of what you believe, all of these occurrences point to solar cycles that increase the energy coming toward the Earth from the sun. Since we are electromagnetic beings, connected to the Earth through electromagnetic fields and shielded from the sun by electromagnetic fields, this increase in energy from the sun is going to change both the energy of the Earth and our personal energy. This means that this new energy has the potential to influence human beings in either positive or negative ways, depending on our individual energy. For example, if you are feeling separation, living by survival emotions and enslaved to the hormones and chemicals of stress, your brain and heart are going to fire incoherently. This will cause your energy and awareness to become divided and out of balance, and the increase in energy from the sun is going to enhance that state of being. Therefore, if you are living in incoherence, that incoherence is going to become amplified.
By the same means, if you are living in the coherent alignment of head and heart, working daily in your meditations to connect to the unified field and to overcome your limited beliefs and attitudes, you are going to be propelled even further into the truth and understanding of who you are and what your purpose is.
The bottom line is that we are in the midst of an initiation, and it is going to take a tremendous amount of will, awareness, and consciousness to stay focused so as not to succumb to these excitable energies. If we can maintain our focus, then instead of being victims of the uncertainty, we can transmute this energy into greater degrees of orderliness, coherence, and even peace, both personally and globally. In the simplest terms, this energy is going to endorse who you are being—that is, how you are thinking and feeling.
The Schumann Resonance
In 1952, German physicist and professor W. O. Schumann hypothesized there were measurable electromagnetic waves in the atmosphere in the cavity (or space) between the Earth’s surface and the ionosphere. According to NASA, the ionosphere is an abundant layer of electrons, ionized atoms, and molecules that stretches from approximately 30 miles above the surface of the Earth to the edge of space, about 600 miles up. This dynamic region grows and shrinks (and further divides into sub-regions) based on solar conditions, and it’s a critical link in the chain of sun-Earth interactions.12 It’s this “celestial power station” that makes radio communications possible.
In 1954, Schumann and H. L. König confirmed Schumann’s hypothesis by detecting resonances at a main frequency of 7.83 Hz; thus the “Schumann resonance” was established by measuring global electromagnetic resonances generated and excited by lightning discharges in the ionosphere. You can think of this frequency as a tuning fork for life. In other words, it acts as a background frequency influencing the biological circuitry of the mammalian brain (the subconscious brain below the neocortex, which is also the home of the autonomic nervous system). The Schumann frequency affects our bodies’ balance, health, and very nature as mammals. In fact, the absence of the Schumann resonance can cause serious mental and physical health issues in the human body.
This was demonstrated through research by German scientist Rutger Wever from the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Erling-Andechs, Germany. In the study, he took young, healthy student volunteers for four weeks at a time and placed them in hermetically sealed underground bunkers that screened out the Schumann frequency. Throughout the four weeks, the students’ circadian rhythms changed, causing them to suffer emotional distress and migraine headaches. When Wever introduced the Schumann frequency back into the bunkers, after only a brief exposure to 7.83 Hz, the volunteers’ health returned to normal.13
As far back as we know, the Earth’s electromagnetic field has been protecting and supporting all living things with this natural frequency pulsation of 7.83 Hz. You can think of the Schumann resonance as the Earth’s heartbeat. The ancient Indian rishis referred to this as OM, or the incarnation of pure sound. Whether by coincidence or not, 7.83 Hz also happens to be a very powerful frequency used with brain-wave entrainment, as it is associated with low levels of alpha and the upper range of theta brain-wave states. It is this range of brain waves that allows us to get beyond the analytical mind and into the subconscious. Thus this frequency has also been associated with high levels of suggestibility, meditation, increased human growth hormone levels, and increased cerebral blood-flow levels.14 It appears, then, that the Earth’s frequency and the brain’s frequency have very similar resonances and that our nervous system can be influenced by the Earth’s electromagnetic field. Perhaps this is why getting out of the city and into nature often provides such a calming effect.
In 1996, researchers at the HeartMath Institute discovered that when an individual’s heart is in a state of coherence or harmonious rhythm, it radiates a more coherent electromagnetic signal into the environment—and that this signal can be detected by the nervous systems of other people, as well as animals. In fact, as you know by now, the heart generates the strongest magnetic field in the body and it can be measured several feet away.15 This provides a credible explanation for the fact that when someone walks into a room, you can feel or sense that individual’s mood or emotional state, independent of their body language.16 From a purely scientific standpoint, we can then ask, if this phenomenon works on an individual level, can it work on a global level?
In 2008, more than a decade later, the HeartMath Institute launched the Global Coherence Initiative (GCI), a science-based, international effort that seeks to help activate the heart of humanity to promote peace, harmony, and a shift in global consciousness. GCI is based on the beliefs that:
Because human heart rhythm and brain frequencies (as well as cardiovascular and autonomic nervous systems) overlap with the Earth’s resonance field, GCI scientists suggest we are part of a biological feedback loop in which we not only receive relevant biological information from the field, but we also feed information into this field.18 In other words, human thoughts (consciousness) and emotions (energy) interact with and encode this information into the Earth’s magnetic field, and this information is then distributed on carrier waves (the signal on which the information is impressed or carried) around the globe.
To further their research and test this hypothesis, using state-of-the-art sensors located in various locations around the globe, the HeartMath Institute created the Global Coherence Monitoring System (GCMS) to observe changes in the Earth’s magnetic field. Designed to measure global coherence, the GCMS uses a system of highly sensitive magnetometers to continuously measure magnetic signals that occur in the same range as human physiological frequencies, including our brain and cardiovascular systems. They also continuously monitor activity caused by solar storms, flares, and solar-wind speed activity resulting from solar storms, disruptions of the Schumann resonances, and potentially the signatures of major global events that have a strong emotional component.19
Why are they doing this and what does it point to? If you can intentionally create a coherent electromagnetic field around your body, and you are related or connected to someone in your life who is also intentionally creating an electromagnetic field around their body, the waves of this shared field would begin to synchronize in a nonlocal way. As the waves from both individuals synchronize, they generate bigger waves and stronger magnetic fields around you, connecting you to the Earth’s electromagnetic field with an increased field of influence.
If we could create a community of people scattered all over the world, with each individual intentionally raising the energy of their own personal field toward greater peace, isn’t it possible that this community could begin to produce a global effect within the Earth’s electromagnetic field? This intentional community could then create coherence where there is incoherence, and order where there has been disorder.
The evidence from peace-gathering studies suggests that our thoughts and feelings do in fact have a measurable effect on every living system. You may have heard of this as the concept of emergence—envision the synchronicity of a school of fish or a flock of birds flying in unison, where all creatures appear to be operating from one mind, connected by an invisible field of energy in a nonlocal way. What is unique about this phenomenon is that it is not a top-down phenomenon, meaning there is no leader. Instead, it is a bottom-up phenomenon, meaning everyone is leading because they are acting as one mind. When a global community comes together in the name of peace, love, and coherence, according to emergence we should be able to produce an effect in the Earth’s electromagnetic field, as well as in each other’s fields. Just imagine, then, what it would be like if we were all behaving, living, thriving, and operating as one. If we understood we were of one mind—one organism connected and united through consciousness—we would understand that to hurt another, or affect another in any way, is to do the same to ourselves. This new paradigm in thinking would be the largest evolutionary leap our species has ever made, causing the need for warring, fighting, competing, fearing, and suffering to become an antiquated concept. But how could this possibility become a reality?
Coherence versus Incoherence
In order for us to create some type of effect in the Earth’s field (which in turn can influence another individual’s field), as you might guess, we have to activate two significant centers in the human body—the heart and the brain. As we learned in Chapter 4, while the brain is of course the center of consciousness and awareness, the heart—the center of oneness, wholeness, and our connection to the unified field—has its own brain. When people can regulate their internal states of care, kindness, peace, love, gratitude, thankfulness, and appreciation, as their hearts become more coherent and balanced, they send a very strong signal to the brain, causing the brain to become more coherent and balanced. This is because the heart and the brain are in continuous communication with each other.
By the same means, once someone moves beyond the association to their body, their environment, and time and takes their attention off matter and objects, they become no body, no one, no thing, no where, in no time. As you well understand by now, when they get beyond themselves and put their awareness on the immaterial world of energy, they connect to the unified field, the place where there’s no longer separation between any body, any one, any thing, and any where, in any time. This causes them to unify with the consciousness of every body, every one, every thing, and every where in every time. As a consciousness, they have now entered the quantum field of energy and information, the place where consciousness and energy can influence the material world in nonlocal ways.
The side effect of this process is that it creates more coherence in the brain and in our energy so our biology becomes more whole. In our research, we’ve found that when the brain becomes more coherent, it affects the autonomic nervous system and the heart. The heart, our connection to the unified field, then acts like a catalyst to amplify the process of coherence back into the brain. Because the heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart, the more coherence you can achieve through the elevated emotions of the heart, the more the brain and the heart synchronize. This synchronization produces measurable effects not only within the body, but also within the electromagnetic field surrounding the body—and the bigger the field we produce around our body, the more we can affect others in a nonlocal way. How do we know this? Because we’ve seen this over and over in our students’ HRV measurements.
Evidence of the influence of the heart’s electromagnetic field upon the field of another’s heart can also be seen in a HeartMath study in which 40 participants were divided into groups of four around 10 card tables. While the heart rhythms of all four participants at the table were being measured, only three people were trained to raise their emotions through HeartMath techniques. When the three trained participants raised their energy and sent positive feelings to the untrained participant, that person also went into higher states of coherence. The authors of the study concluded that “evidence of heart-to-heart synchronization across subjects was found which lends credence to the possibility of heart-to-heart biocommunications.”20
Key to the process of coherence is getting beyond the analytical mind. (We know this because we’ve measured it enough times in the brain scans of our students. Their participation has also demonstrated that with enough practice, coherence can be achieved in a relatively short amount of time.) When the thinking brain is quieted, it moves into alpha or theta brain-wave states, and this opens the doorway between the conscious and subconscious mind. The autonomic nervous system then becomes more receptive to information. By raising our energy through the feelings of elevated emotions, we become less matter and more energy, less particle and more wave. The bigger the field we can create with these energies—as energy, awareness, and consciousness—the more we can influence others in a nonlocal way.
The greater energy you can create through the elevated emotions of the heart, the more you’re going to connect with the unified field, which means you’re going to experience more wholeness, connection, and oneness. But you can’t experience that connection when you’re incoherent, feeling separate, or living by the hormones of stress. When the chemicals released during stress arouse the brain, we feel disconnected from the unified field and we tend to make less evolved choices. We know without a doubt that the emotions of competition, fear, anger, unworthiness, guilt, and shame keep us separate from one another because they produce slower and lower frequencies than elevated emotions like love, gratitude, care, and kindness, which produce faster and higher frequencies. We also know that the faster the frequency, the more energy is present. This prompted us to ask several questions:
Building a Collective Coherent Field
Since early 2013, we’ve partnered with our friends at the HeartMath Institute to further our research. Since we began measuring our students’ physiological states, we’ve scanned thousands of brains and hearts, resulting in a significant amount of information. We have been overwhelmed and mystified by some of the data we’ve collected when common people start doing the uncommon.
Over the course of this journey, in collaboration with HeartMath, we’ve witnessed amazing measurements in our students. We’ve taken equally amazing measurements of the collective energy in the rooms where our students have gathered—measurements that show consistent, daily increases in energy—using a sophisticated sensor from Russia called Sputnik (mentioned briefly in Chapter 2).
Since elevated emotions, related to the activity of the autonomic nervous system, produce electromagnetic fields, increasing those emotions results in changes in blood microcirculation, perspiration, and other functions of the body. Because Sputnik is so sensitive, it can quantify environmental fluctuations by measuring barometric shifts, relative humidity, air temperature, electromagnetic fields, and more.21
Take a look at Graphics 15A and 15B in the color insert. In these measurements from our workshops, you can see a trend that demonstrates an increase in the collective energy of the room. The first line in red is our baseline measurement and shows the room’s energy before the start of the event. As you look at the red, blue, green, and finally the brown lines (each color representing a different day), you can see that each day the energy steadily increases. In Graphics 15C and 15D, the same color scale applies; however, these measurements reflect specific time intervals during each day’s morning meditations. This means our students are getting better at raising the energy of the room by creating more unified coherence.
The Sputnik readings demonstrate that the collective energy created by our students from the first day of the workshop to the final day consistently makes incremental increases. Within that trend, we’ve found that most groups are extremely focused and the energy rises every day. About one-quarter of the time, the energy stays relatively the same for the first day or two, but in the following days, the energy increases significantly. We believe this is because during the first day or two, the group is working on overcoming themselves by breaking the energetic emotional bonds that keep them connected to their past-present reality. So during this time, they are drawing from the unified field to build their own personal electromagnetic fields. This siphoning from the field tends to cause the collective energy in the room to drop. But once those individual fields become greater, more enhanced, and coherent, they entrain to one another, which is when we tend to see dramatic increases in the energy of the room.
Figure 13.2 shows that when two coherent waves come together, they create a bigger wave. This is called constructive interference. The bigger the wave, the higher the amplitude of energy. As a result of our students’ more coherent waves coming together during our workshops, the energy of the group field increases, and then there’s more energy to heal and to create or access greater levels of mind, which can sometimes lead to mystical experiences.
Constructive interference is when two coherent waves come together to create a bigger wave. Amplitude is the measurement of the height of a wave. The higher the amplitude, the higher the energy. If a community of people are all gathered and are creating coherent electromagnetic fields, when their energies interfere, it makes sense that the energy of the room will increase.
My team and I have been consistently humbled by our students’ profound healings, their ability to increase and regulate elevated states, and their reports of mystical experiences or acute insights into their lives as a result of learning how to regulate their brain waves, open their hearts, and go into coherence. Some of these occurrences could be labeled as miracles, but we believe it’s just a part of the process of becoming supernatural. This led us to wonder if our students could affect the nervous systems of others, and if so, what the implications of that would be. These questions would spark the birth of Project Coherence.
In collaboration with the HeartMath Institute, we performed numerous experiments whereby we took a small, random sampling of about 50 to 75 people at our advanced workshops, attached HRV monitors to their chests, and placed them in the front row of the room for three meditations over the course of 24 hours. Since HRV not only provides insight into the coherence of the heart, but also gives us information about the brain and emotions, we wanted to measure subjects’ HRV for a full 24 hours.
To start the meditation, everyone in the room placed their attention on their heart center and began breathing through this center slowly and deeply, as you learned to do in Chapter 7. Next, they cultivated and sustained an elevated emotion for two to three minutes, broadening their hearts’ electromagnetic fields and moving from a state of selfishness to a state of selflessness. Then we had the collective of 550 to 1,500 students broadcast the energy of their elevated emotions beyond their body into the space of the entire room. Next, we had them lay the intentional thought in that frequency for the greatest good of the students sitting in the front of the room wearing the HRV monitors—that their lives be enriched, their bodies be healed, and mystical experiences find them.
Our goal was to measure the collective energy in the room and its potential nonlocal effect on the people wearing the HRV monitors. Could those elevated levels of energy and frequency in the form of love, gratitude, wholeness, and joy cause another person’s heart to go into coherence—even if they were on the other side of the room? Our results confirmed our hypothesis. Not only did the broadcast energy produce a coherent effect on the people wearing the HRV monitors, but each of their hearts went into coherence at the exact same time, in the exact same meditation, on the exact same day—and this was not a one-time occurrence. We repeatedly found consistent results across our events. What does this mean?
Our data supports the HeartMath Global Coherence Initiative’s belief that an invisible field exists upon which information is communicated. This field links and influences all living systems, as well as our collective human consciousness. Because of this field, information is communicated nonlocally between people at a subconscious level through the autonomic nervous system.22 In other words, we are bound and connected by an invisible field of energy, and this energy field can affect everyone’s behaviors, emotional states, and conscious and unconscious thoughts.
Because all frequency carries information, the magnetic fields produced in the hearts of the student body acted as carrier waves for this information. If at our workshops we can produce nonlocal effects on others, shouldn’t our elevated, heart-centered emotions be able to produce nonlocal effects on our children, partners, coworkers, or anyone we have a relationship or share a connection with?
If you look at Figure 13.3, you notice 17 people going into heart coherence at the exact same time, on the exact same day, during the exact same meditation. All of these students who went into heart coherence were being entrained by the energy of others. The students sending the energy embraced the intention for the greatest good of those people wearing the heart rate monitors. The results show that when we get out of our own way, we can become one mind and nonlocally connect to one another. Through that connection, we can influence the autonomic nervous system of others so they will feel more balanced, coherent, and whole. Imagine what could happen if you had thousands of people all doing the same for the entire world.
Shortly after these global meditation events, our students began sending us e-mails asking that since we showed that we could indeed create a measurable change in the energy of a room where 550 to 1,500 people were gathered, could we then produce the same effect on a global scale? So it was our students who requested we organize global meditations, giving birth to Project Coherence. We broadcast our first Project Coherence over Facebook in November 2015, with more than 6,000 people from all over the world joining together online to collectively create a more loving and peaceful world. In our second meditation, more than 36,000 online viewers participated, and in our third global meditation, more than 43,000 joined forces. It is our intention to continue to host these Project Coherence events, each time creating a stronger radiating influence of peace and love over the planet. In time, we hope to measure these effects.
Figure 13.3. This is a graph showing 17 people going into heart coherence at the exact same time, on the exact same day, during the exact same meditation. The area between the vertical lines shows everyone going into heart coherence.
Start by acknowledging your heart center. With focus and awareness, lock into that center, open your focus, and begin to become aware of the space it occupies in space, as well as the space around the space your heart occupies in space.
Then move as a thought and an awareness into the center of the Earth and radiate your light beyond the Earth in space. All I want you to do is raise your frequency and hold on to that emotion. Still as a consciousness and awareness, slowly move away from the Earth, and then take the Earth as a thought and place it in your heart. As you hold the entire planet in your heart, raise the frequency of the Earth as a thought, and broadcast that energy beyond your body in space. Radiate your love into the Earth.
