The Prayer of Life…Heart Electromagnetics, Part III

In this May Day writing we continue our exploration of the heart’s functions in the process of life.

The 2 prior Journal entries covered the foundational science of the heart’s more subtle functional processes which are not often considered in our day to day lives and interactions. These functional processes may be thought of as how the heart goes about being the organ of central organizing intelligence in our lives.

Current day science and spirituality have not yet fully found their way into each other’s arms, but their dance moves may be improving. The two were set apart from one another in Western thinking long ago in the 17th century when Rene Descartes and Isaac Newton brought forth the beginnings of reductionist thinking. The reductionists thought that anything can be reduced into its various parts and the whole can be known through the parted out reduction.

We seem to still be operating in many diverse reduced compartments. The holism of all forms of knowledge and experiential wisdom escapes us still. Perhaps it is time to put things back together again…back into the whole…and develop a kinder regard for the concept of the hologram which contains the whole in any and all of its myriad parts.

The full functional capacity of the heart beyond its neuromuscular pumping function is not yet widely known about and appreciated. And yet, whenever you ask someone to point to themselves, they will always point to the area of their chest where their heart resides, as if to signify the seat of their identity. People do not point to their head, or their abdomen, or other body areas. However, we all know some people who act as if their functional identity lies in some other part of the body than the chest.

I have yet to meet someone who, upon being requested to point to themselves, might gesture with a wide sweeping circular arc of both arms around their body through their auric field, allowing their hands to come to rest with palms together in front of their chest. It seems that simply pointing to one’s heart area with one hand is an adequate gesture which is universally acceptable and is performed by all people.

This Journal entry expands upon the concepts posed in “The Spiral of Life” where the heart’s role as a bi-directional antenna which functions via quantum field effects was introduced as the instrument of intercessory prayer, as well as being the organ responsible for our connection to the quantum field.

We’ll now consider some nice evidence to support the science and power of group prayer from the standpoint of heart based consciousness.

Experiments in Consciousness

The Journal of Conflict Resolution, founded in 1957, is a peer reviewed academic journal covering research on international conflict and conflict resolution. This publication comes out 8 times a year. In 1988 an important landmark study was published in the December edition, Volume 32, Issue 4, pages 776-812.

This study is entitled “International Peace Project in the Middle East, The Effects of the Maharishi Technology on the Unified Field.” The author of this study and article are David Orme-Johnson, Ph.D., as well as 4 other colleagues. An abstract summary of the initial study appears in the References at the end of this Journal entry.

The study undertaken was the first to use collective prayer to promote peace in an attempt to mitigate the then ongoing war in Lebanon. During the peak of the war, hundreds of participants gathered in Jerusalem for 60 days, twice daily praying on producing an influence of peace that would have a spillover effect into the surrounding society.

I first heard about this study back in 2004, and then later I read about it in an article printed in the quarterly Light of Consciousness, Winter edition, Volume 18, #3, 2006. This article describes the prayer study and was written by the well known quantum physicist, John Hagelin, Ph.D. This particular writing was adapted from a presentation he gave in Boulder, CO, in that time period.

Dr. Hagelin is well regarded as an educator, author, and leading researcher on states of higher consciousness and quantum physics. He received his undergraduate degree summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in 1975, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1981. He is currently a professor of physics at Maharishi University. His scientific career and spiritual based efforts to bring peace to this planet have received deserved recognition. He is a visionary spiritual man and quantum physicist.

Dr. Hagelin’s article is entitled “Meditating for World Peace.” Much of the information shared below is adapted from this writing.

The premise for the Middle East prayer study lies in the consideration that Consciousness is a field which underlies, permeates, and connects all things. Each of us can be viewed as a different broadcasting antenna; each of us radiating and stimulating the electromagnetic field which envelops and permeates our lives. We broadcast waves from our hearts which travel infinitely and interdimensionally via the scalar wave effects which I covered in “The Spiral of Life” writing.

When we put coherent broadcasting antennae together, we get an enhanced combined waveform. When people and their heart antennae stimulate the underlying unbounded field of Consciousness, an effect is produced in the field of collective Consciousness which affects us all.

When groups of individuals collectively pray or meditate and collectively stimulate that field with coherent energies, a much bigger wave is produced. In physics, this effect is known as constructive interference.

In contrast, individuals whose energies are incongruent and divisive will create a destructive interference wave pattern with a net result of a partial or total degree of cancellation of the effort.

By way of an analogy, 2 loudspeakers broadcasting the same music (same wavelength and frequency), placed in close proximity, produce 4 times the sound of one loudspeaker. Three loudspeakers will produce 9 times the sound of one loudspeaker. The waves add together in an augmentation, and the power of the wave grows as the square of the number of radiating sources of individual waves.

If Consciousness is a field that we are radiating in, and if we begin to radiate a coherent heart based emanation from more than one source, then only a small number of people should be able to establish a much larger coherent radiation to produce an effect in the field. Such is the premise of the study reported by Dr. Orme-Johnson, et al…How many coherently meditating/praying people does it take to influence a specific target population?

During the study, the quality of life in Jerusalem and neighboring Lebanon was recorded, particularly the number of war deaths, war injuries, bombs dropped, small arms ammunition spent, and other such ways of measuring mayhem, murder, suffering, and destruction. Progress towards peace among rival factions was also considered and quantified.

Even before the study was put through the rigors of statistical analysis it was obvious that there was a significant co-variation between the size of the meditating group and the improved progress towards peace in the Middle East. In consideration of the variables of the experiment, such as temperature and other factors which are known to influence violence, crime, and war; a powerful statistical significance was noted. The probability that the observed outcome was happenstance is less than one part in about one hundred thousand, which is quite an acceptable standard in the study of social sciences.

This study was published after 2 years of scrutiny via a process of anonymous peer review. The editor of the journal wrote an accompanying letter of merit testifying to the arduous scrutiny process.

Over the next 2 years and 3 months, seven different scientific collaborations repeated the study. The groups looked at using different sized groups located at different distances from the conflict, some in Lebanon, and some much farther away. Each of these efforts produced results which were highly significant in terms of progress towards peace, reduced war deaths, war injuries, and other outcome points, when compared with all other periods during the same 2 years and 3 months.

When there was no meditating group in place, there was violent deterioration. When meditating groups were in place, there was statistically significant improvement in circumstances. A combined report of these studies was published in the Journal of Social Behavior and Personality after yet another couple of years of even more peer review. Now we are out into 1992. According to this report, the likelihood that the combined results were a statistical mistake is less than one part in ten million million million.

The Results of the Meditation Studies

How many people, engaged in a coherent thought/feeling prayer offering, does it take to influence the activity of a population of people?

The studies showed that it takes the square root of 1% of the population under consideration.

In consideration of the population of humans currently inhabiting the planet, this number is the square root of 1% of 7,500,000,000 people, or about 8660 people. According to the results of the study, less than 9000 people, unified in coherent prayer, could help bring peace to this planet.

I’ll quote Dr. Hagelin’s conclusions: “The phenomenon of reducing war, terrorism, and social violence by defusing the social stress that fuels violence and conflict, by defusing the acute religious and political and ethnic tensions that drive terrorism and violence, and by defusing these tensions through collective meditation, has been more thoroughly studied now and more rigorously confirmed than any phenomenon in the history of the social sciences.”

Prayer or Meditation?

A variety of types of prayer have been practiced over time. Prayers of faith, worship, supplication, intercession, thanksgiving, consecration, agreement, and imprecation are described in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. I should make note…the last form of prayer on this list, imprecation, is not going to help anything get better.

In prayer, the brain mind is often strongly in play creating the word constructs of the prayer to appeal to the higher Power. If the one who is praying can achieve heart resonant frequency of 0.1 cycles per second, then the brain mind can sync in with the heart’s frequency with a state of calm and higher emotional states, which is more conducive to the prayer experience.

Meditation is a different kind of experience in which the participant is seeking a state of mindfulness and immersion in a higher consciousness where brain mind chatter and activity slow down and cease into quietude. This allows for the development of more heart based consciousness, which is a healthy and happy way to live.

Deep prayer, or contemplation, tends to merge into meditation over time. The heart is the instrument of facilitation in both prayer and meditation. Because of this fact and for the purposes of this Journal writing, I consider prayer and meditation to be very similar experiences in consciousness.

As long as the heart has reached a state of resonant frequency of 0.1 cycles per second, as was described in “The Pulse of Life” writing, then it matters little if we consider ourselves to be in prayer or meditation. Some kind of intention from the heart of the participant is going to be announced into the field in both of these contemplative endeavors.

Modern day versions of intentional heart based prayer stipulate a requirement for the petitioner of the prayer to bring themselves into emotional alignment with what it is that they are asking for. For instance, if one is seeking some form of abundance in their life, then they should not pray with a fearful feeling and vibration of scarcity in their heart.

We can’t want more of anything if we are focused on not having enough. Life is meant to be abundant in all areas. There is more than enough to go around for everyone. This abundance comes through a mind that is aware of its own infinite nature. It is said that the Universe is listening to the heart, not so much to the brain words.

We become the co-creator in our own reality. A three step process in this type of heart based prayer is:

1. Ask for what you want. The Universe is responding to your request at the level of the quality of your heart frequency.
2. Answer…The Universe (Mind of God) does this part for you. The Universe literally starts to rearrange itself to make your desire manifest for you.
3. Receive…You become receptive by bringing yourself into alignment with what you are asking for. Your feeling state lets you know if you are in alignment. When you feel good, then you are in alignment. Generate the feeling of what it will feel like when what you have asked for has become manifest. The most trustworthy feeling to generate here is the feeling of gratitude.

Offer your thoughts deliberately through the field pulsation of your heart. This is described and illustrated in The Pulse of Life. Decide what you want and focus on that with a gratitude as if what you desire has already arrived in your life. This effort becomes an effort of getting to know our heart and all of the things it is doing.

Resist focusing on any residual from the past which brings you negative feelings. If you find yourself being bombarded by terrorist automatic negative thoughts (ANTs), then you must find some therapeutic means by which you can negotiate these ANTs into at least a neutral state.

Everything is made of energy and everything in the Universe exists in an infinitely abundant and interconnected energy field. We exist as the infinite field of unfolding energy extensions of Source energy. We cannot be separate from the Divinity which lives within us as us.

Please see the Reading list below for more recommendations for good prayer.

Concluding Remarks

Dr. Hagelin calls for the establishment in our government of a Department of Peace, a refreshingly correct vision. Why do we reject this possibility?

In consideration of the current aggressive level of military and imperialistic insanity, the window of time for us to establish this agenda may be closing.

When will we be ready to establish a Department of Peace in our government that the military industrial and security complex will not try to possess and rule? As has been written so often…Einstein’s famous quote applies…we cannot solve a problem from the same state of consciousness which created the problem.

We all possess the power of One, and we should be figuring out how to use this gift and spiritual technology in a collaborative union to save humanity from succumbing to the current negative and alarming geopolitical, socioeconomic, and geophysical trends which have befallen the globe, and all of its inhabitants.

Just consider a few of our issues… the world financial system being on the verge of a currency collapse, diseases of pandemic threat, ongoing global wars, 2 billion people living on less than a few dollars a day, thousands of children starving to death daily, and a human population expanding to the point of extinguishing many forms of other life on our planet home, not to mention its own life in the process.

A Government of Peace is called for. The current government for war holds no promise. America now has military bases in 171 of the world’s 192 countries. The military budget is close to $1 Trillion! This is an appalling and alarming misuse of economy and technological resources.

In the course of world history all empires have gone bankrupt or have crumbled from within or without. Here is a listing of those empires in our history. Curiously, the United States Empire is currently not on the list.

We will have to evolve past these difficult and problematic forms of militaristic human expression. The current methods of destruction and mayhem run the gamut from “conventional” warfare to chemical-biological warfare to thermonuclear warfare. There is also economic warfare, psychological warfare, information (propaganda) warfare, and cyber-warfare.

The well regarded General Omar Bradley said at his Armistice Day address in Boston in November, 1948…

“We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. . . . Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”

War is not normal. We have been desensitized and conditioned to think that war is a normal condition of life on Earth. We are human beings with the potential for full access to the field of consciousness, wherein lies our infinite potential. It is time for us to learn how to access this field and change our violent trends into pursuits for peace and prosperity.

To help us shift our perspective about these global problems, Franciscan priest Richard Rohr exhorts us to contemplate the scapegoat mechanism which is used when we feel the need to project our individual or collective shadow onto some other person or group…

“Sadly, the history of violence and the history of religion are almost the same history. When religion remains at the immature level, it tends to create very violent people who ensconce themselves on the side of the good, the worthy, the pure, the saved. They project all their evil somewhere else and attack it over there. At this level, they export the natural death instinct onto others, as though it’s someone else who has to die.”

“As long as you can deal with evil by some means other than forgiveness, you will never experience the real meaning of evil and sin. You will keep projecting, fearing, and attacking it over there, instead of ‘gazing’ on it within and ‘weeping’ over it within yourself and all of us. The longer you gaze, the more you will see your own complicity in and profitability from the sin of others, even if it is the satisfaction of feeling you are on higher moral ground. Forgiveness demands three new simultaneous ‘seeings’: I must see God in the other; I must access God in myself; and I must experience God in a new way that is larger than an ‘Enforcer.'”

Once upon a time in Boulder I was conducting a presentation before a group of people when I attempted to describe prayer as something that happens in the heart all of the time, and that we go about constantly emanating from our hearts into the field, whether we allow ourselves to be conscious of this, or not. When we become conscious of our own energetic offering from minute to minute then we can line up with the field of intention with a more coherent and augmented effect. This is akin to the statement to “pray with all of your heart.”

In conclusion…in order to pray from the heart, one has to know how to enter the heart and reside in its consciousness. Prayer vibrations originate and are broadcast into the body and into the field from the one organ which is intimately and holographically entangled with all of that…and that is the heart.

Please remember what was stated in the earlier Journal, The Pulse of Life…the heart has the strongest electromagnetic field emanation of any organ. The next Journal in this series, The Spiral of Life, explains how the heart’s muscular anatomical arrangement (the helical ventricular myocardial band; the HVMB) results in the heart’s profound electromagnetic effects on the quantum field.

The Universe (Mind of God) is not surveying our thoughts which are just word abstractions cooked up in the thinking brain, an organ which has a relatively low electromagnetic force field emanation. Prayer thoughts are word abstractions. Instead, the Universe is responding and shifting and rearranging itself around the wordless vibrations which come from the heart.

So…contemplate your heart and everything you can possibly feel inside of your heart and everything you can possibly sense that may be being broadcast from your heart into the field of consciousness and intention.

This is obviously a practice and state of living which is beyond words. It is more of a visualization and a feeling of what it feels like when that visualization is complete and manifest.

To become mindful of this ongoing heart activity that we are always engaged in is the essence of heart based consciousness.

Thank you for reading.

May Peace and every good attend you…and emanate from your heart in these times.

Signing off from Crestone and Beyond.

References and Reading:

1. A Scientific Venture Into Collective Consciousness: Could It Be The Key To Positive Global Change?…posted here on 5-16-24. From the HeartMath Institute, “Introducing Global Consciousness Project 2.0 (GCP 2.0), a pioneering initiative delving into the influence of collective human experiences on global consciousness. Driven by the contributions of Citizen Scientists like yourself, GCP 2.0 empowers researchers with invaluable data and insights, shedding light on the intricacies of consciousness and the profound role of the human heart.” A 3.5 minute video explains this fascinating and important project.
2. Can Love And Compassion Literally Change The World?…posted here on 5-16-24 is a deeper explanation of the research project mentioned in #1 above. Rollin McCraty, Ph.D., Director of Research at the HeartMath Institute, explores the fascinating research on love and compassion in this interview.
3. Prayer…a writing on this website which explores prayer and how it operates in our lives.
4. Abstract summary of the original consciousness experiment to promote peace in the Middle East.
5. John Hagelin’s website
6. New Illuminati…A new-age-like website that references this study, the Global Coherence Initiative (GCI), and the ongoing efforts at the HeartMath Institute.
7. The Maharishi Effect…a 2 minute video.
8. The Maharishi Effect: The Most Powerful Thing We can do to Calm Ourselves & the World…an article from March, 19, 2017, published in Elephant Journal.
9. Societal Effects: Scholarly Exchanges on the Maharishi Effect…critiques and rebuttals with the lead author of the original study, David Orme-Johnson, Ph.D., and is posted on his website.
10. Scholarly articles about distant healing by prayer…many articles about the efficacy of intercessory prayer in healing from a distance.
11. A Short Video about what HeartMath is doing to help improve life on Earth.
12. Minding your Meditation…an earlier Journal on this website from 2014, where I describe aspects of meditation.
13. On Life, Heart, and Life after Life…the earliest writing on this website about the heart…and also how fear affects it.
14. Global Coherence Initiative (GCI)…This ambitious project seeks to further our understanding and practice of assisting the evolution of human consciousness and world peace by helping humanity understand how the heart and heart resonant frequency can positively affect population groups as well as global society. The GCI project researches the interconnection between humanity and the Earth’s magnetic fields and energetics using 6 magnetometers which are located around the world. The current locations are in California, Canada (Alberta), Lithuania, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and New Zealand.
15. Monthly Global Coherence Initiative Synchronized Care Focus…occurs every full moon…a collective heart awakening to the need to get along with each other for the greater good.
16. Smart Brain Wise Heart Social Emotional Program…a new e-Learning program from HeartMath for young people ages 9-16 which draws on the best of young people’s hearts and brains, empowering them to make smarter decisions and improve self-control, academic success, and social skills. Programs like this will lead to a more peaceful society and world.
17. 12 Prayers for these times, and all other times.…words to use in prayer practice to shift to heart coherence, joining with many others who pray in the field of intention.
18. Two Exercises for Turning Intention into Motivation…prayer and intention setting are closely related. Here is a Buddhist perspective on how to manifest intention.
19. New Analysis Technique Support Group Synchronization With Magnetic Fields…interesting data here, posted on 1-18-18.
20. Express Gratitude…the healing power of gratitude is explored here via a dozen methods to practice expressing it.
21. Buddhism’s Higher Power…a beautiful writing about prayer.
22. Elevated Music…an interview with the famed Tibetan musician Nawang Khechog, who has led a very interesting and exciting life, and has great lessons to share with us about the heart.
23. Real Love…a Buddhist practitioner shares some insights about Love.
24. Each Individual Impacts the Field Environment…a nice summary from HeartMath about how our thoughts and emotions affect the field and beings around us.
25. Top 12 Tips to Strengthen Gratitude…the benefits of culturing gratitude and practices to enhance gratitude are covered here.
26. ‘Doctor Peyo’ the Healing Horse…posted here on 3-15-21. This is a good story on the power of large mammalian hearts. Peyo is a 15 year old stallion who routinely visits dying patients in a hospital in Calais, France, to deliver his special equine therapy. Here is a short video of Peyo in action with his patients. This nice miracle of healing and comfort is made possible because of Peyo’s heart field and the effect it has on other heart fields.
27. Connecting Hearts: Understanding the Research of the Symbiotic Relationship Between Horses and Humans…posted here on 6-29-22 is this 3 minute video which explains how human and equine horses entrain with one another.
28. Here is some good prayer commentary from Franciscan priest, writer, and teacher Richard Rohr. You can understand how prayer is an immersive and contemplative process in this short passage. Prayer and meditation merge.