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The Institute of Noetic Sciences interviews Dr John Hagelin - Part I
by Byron Belitsos

Institute of Noetic Sciences - Shift in Action Translate This Article
28 August 2007

[Full transcript of the interview, Part I:]

Byron Belitsos:
Today I'm honored to be interviewing John Hagelin, PhD, a world renowned quantum physicist, educator, public policy expert, who's well known to most of us at IONS.

John's scientific contributions are well known, they're extensive. They include some of the most cited references in the physical sciences today and in particular John's own Grand Unified Field theory based on the superstring, but Dr. Hagelin is unique among scientists in being one of the first to apply this advanced knowledge of physics for practical benefit. John had pioneered the use of Unified Field based techniques, scientifically proven, which we're going to talk about, that proven scientifically to reduce crime, violence and the like, and these techniques are derived from the ancient Vedic Science of consciousness.

John has published ground breaking research in this field, much of which was summarized in the most recent issue of Shift magazine, which establishes the existence of long range field effects of consciousness that are generated through large groups engaged in collective meditation.

John, you're currently the Director of the Institute of Science Technology and Public Policy and many other things, but in particular we're interested in the Invincible American Assembly, which you formed and launched last year around this time. Well, John, welcome to the programme.

John Hagelin:
It's good to be here, thanks for having me.

BB:
Thanks for coming, very much. John, your demonstration project which we covered in the last issue of Shift has repeatedly shown that large meditating groups can diffuse societal stresses and actually, literally preventing future social conflicts and we'd like to ask you, in light of the fact that you've launched the Invincible American Assembly to update our listeners to your findings with special reference to the nature or power of intention as you understand it.

JH:
Very good.

First, the word invincibility, to me, means really—in this day and age—the absence of enemies. There really is no conventional defense against terrorism or weapons of mass destruction except to be without an enemy, to reduce the acute societal stress, religious, political, and ethnic tensions particularly against the US in response to some of US's own actions.

To diffuse enmity and potential adversaries so enemies just don't rise against a country, that's the only way any country today is going to be secure. That's why I called this course the Invincible American Assembly. We could have called it the Peaceful American Assembly or Without an Enemy American Assembly, that might have made more sense.

This course began in last July, late July, and we have predicted in advance, as we have in all our experiments, what we expected to see based on the number of meditators that we hoped to recruit. And we're pretty much at that number, and the effects we expected to see and predicted we would see, we have seen. And this is, again, a highly significant statistical finding in the different areas that we've done research already. Some of this research is very much in progress, and anything we talk about on this particular programme will be preliminary but off to be published.

BB:
So in regard to the power of intention or the relationship of intention to the work of the actual meditation, the collective meditation, how can you characterize that as a physicist? What is the relationship between the two?

JH:
Well, I have to define what intention means to me, and I think I can talk about it afterwards more coherently.

BB:
Yeah, let's go to that first.

JH:
Intention is, I would say, a localized beam of consciousness. Consciousness in its nature is unbounded, all pervasive, universal, pure being, pure subjectivity, pure self aware consciousness without an object. And that intention-free, or even, object-free consciousness is the simplest, most fundamental state of human awareness—now considered to be a fourth major state of human consciousness.

The meditative state is very distinct from normal waking attentive consciousness—as distinct from sleeping, dreaming, hypnosis, as anything else that's ever been studied. It even has its own brainwave signature. So consciousness is by nature a vast, unbounded reality.

But when we focus the intention through our senses, for example, to a particular object or a particular thought or a particular intention, that's a localization of this non-local field of consciousness, a localized beam of consciousness. Another analogy would be like a wave rising up on an unbounded ocean. So that's an intention. Intention is directed consciousness, I think you could say, and that's how we pretty much all understand it anyway.

BB:
Yes. So given that definition of intention, it would seem that, and also based on the conversation with some of your colleagues that was published in Shift magazine, in a way as the Assembly is practicing it, is not specifically focused in this way on a particular intention, but rather opening up to the all-pervading consciousness. So in a sense, there isn't a specific intention, is there?

JH:
That's exactly right. It's good to think of intention sort of a localized beam of consciousness—can be very weak or very strong. Just like you can have a flashlight with very weak batteries and the lens. Even though it's a focused beam, it's a very dim beam.

And what we're really doing in the meditative state, we're turning off the beam—if you wish, letting consciousness expand to become global, universal. And in the process of expanding consciousness, it's like you've got new batteries. Now, if the intensity of the light is increased, now, whatever you put your attention on afterwards is going to be more effective, more fruitful. Another way of understanding this is that intention can be very strong. The Bible says, for example, through faith we can move mountains. It can also be extremely feeble and, frankly, often is.

You can put some heavyweights together at a breakfast table—let's take your favorite consciousness relative heavyweights that you find running around the country today—and you can ask this small group to move a speck of toast across the table, and they typically can't do it. But why is that? These are not weak people. It's just that they're going about it wrong, in the sense that the deeper levels of mind, the more powerful intention becomes. And it's exactly for the very same reason; it's the quantum uncertainty principle.

The quantum uncertainty principle is the principle of increasing power at deeper levels, at fundamental scales. The reason that nuclear power is a million times more powerful than burning an object, chemical energy, is because chemical energy involves molecular manipulation and nuclear power involves manipulation of the nuclear structure, which is a million times smaller than the molecule, a million times more fundamental; and therefore, according to the uncertainty principle, a million times more powerful.

Literally, the power of thought varies by factors of millions, between people and even for a given subject, depending on whether that subject is using the mind at a stressed and agitated state of consciousness—superficial level of consciousness—or whether they're using the mind at a very expanded, very deep level of consciousness. That's the nuclear level of thought, almost the Unified Field level of thought, which is pure, unbounded being.

And on the course, the reason we're spending time in meditation, not necessarily thinking about peace, is because it's taking the mind deep down into there, the maximally expanded state of comprehension, universal comprehension, field of Being. That's where thought is much more powerful.

So, it is really, in a sense, an exercise in intention, but it is intention that is entertained at the deepest, most expanded, most powerful level of consciousness. And that's why a couple thousand people, which is what we've got, can literally change the trends in an entire country, as big as the United States.

[End of Part I of the transcript from the interview on 28 August 2007. Part II will be featured in Global Good News on 12 November 2007.]

Copyright © Shift in Action, Intention Download Transcripts • August 2007

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