New Realities recorded on May 31, 2011
Summary
Alan Steinfeld interviews Lynne McTaggart about her book, The Bond. They discuss the shift from a Newtonian and Darwinian worldview of separateness and competition to a new scientific paradigm based on quantum physics and biology, which reveals that the universe is fundamentally interconnected. McTaggart explains that humans are hardwired for cooperation, fairness, and connection. They explore practical ways to foster community and create a fairer society from the bottom up through intention, mindfulness, and small, cooperative actions.
Transcript
Alan Steinfeld
Welcome to New Realities. This is Alan Steinfeld and I am very happy to have back on this program one of the leading thinkers I feel in this merging of spirit and science, this spiritual renaissance that’s happening around the planet. She’s Lynne McTaggart and she has a new book out called The Bond. And she’ll also be in New York next week, June 7th at the Open Center and then at other gatherings around New York you can check my schedule or her schedule. Lynne, welcome.
Lynne McTaggart
Thank you Alan, it’s thrilling to be here.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, I’m really happy that you’re back on course. This is your third book in this series of transforming the scientific paradigm, wouldn’t you say?
Lynne McTaggart
It is, Alan, and it is the one I’ve been working on since I wrote The Field in a sense. I’ve been thinking and planning always to kind of take the book past the theoretical to how do we live the science. You know, we’ve been talking about the science for many years and I just felt it was time to walk the science. And it was also time to move beyond physics and to look at all the life sciences, the biology and astronomy and sociology and psychology and all the ologies. And to basically say where we’re headed. And how does where we’re headed compare with the scientific story we’ve had up till now. And if it’s different, what do we do about it? How do we live it?
Alan Steinfeld
Well, that’s what I really got from this book, that you actually are changing the scientific paradigm and bringing it a whole new direction. I mean, in The Field, you say there’s this field of energy that we interact with, sort of. I mean, of course it’s more complicated than that. And then in The Intention Experiment, you say we affect the field. But now you’re saying we are the field, basically.
Lynne McTaggart
Basically, yes. I wrote the book basically to answer two questions. One was, were we meant to be so competitive? I really started this out a long time ago from a very deep place of experiencing a lot of my life as being highly competitive. And I kept thinking to myself, were we meant to be this way? I mean, it started out very personally. I have two daughters and one of them is a very talented actress, and she was chosen as the lead role in her school play. And suddenly she was shunted to a more minor role. And I could never figure out the reason until one of her friends let slip that she had been bumped aside when another girl lied to take over her position, and this girl happened to be her best friend. Well, I tried to bring this up with the girl’s mother, and she kind of turned to me and just airily said, ‘Well, that’s life, isn’t it?’ And that just kind of shocked me because I kept thinking to myself, ‘Well, yeah, it is. That’s the life we adults have created for ourselves.’ And I just wondered whether this was really what nature had in store for us. Was this what we were supposed to do? Because that’s certainly an integral part of our scientific story, the whole idea of eat or be eaten, survival of the fittest. So I basically wanted to find out, was this right? Was this really the scientific story? And if not, how were we supposed to live?
Alan Steinfeld
Well, if that’s not the scientific story, there is something. I mean, cooperation of course is what you’re saying, or the bond that exists. But where does competition come from? It’s not just because people believe in Darwin that we have competition. There is some organic structure to that as well. Isn’t that true?
Lynne McTaggart
I’m not sure, Alan, because it’s not competition as we’ve defined it in the West isn’t universal. There’s lots of cultures that don’t live this way. They believe in a very different way of living. They believe in much more cooperative structure. I think competition comes about to some degree through certain evolution of our societal structures, but I think it really has a lot to do with how we define ourselves and how we relate to each other because of those definitions. And lots of things define us, our religion, our philosophy, our culture, all sorts of things. But one of the big things that defines us is science. And it’s only been 300 plus years that we’ve defined the universe as being composed of separate things. We thought of life as a much more organic whole before Newton. Newton really described the world as filled up with a whole load of individual things. And then Darwin basically coined the term, well actually he didn’t, one of his friends did. He came up with a very metaphoric representation of life as struggle because he was very influenced at the time by Malthus, who believed that we were just about to overrun ourselves with population explosion. So those were big thoughts at the time. But Darwin’s ideas in a sense got hijacked by his friends. He was much more into cooperation later in his life particularly. But his friends were very much into, they took his ideas and they circulated them. And because of modern printmaking really coming to the fore around that time, his ideas swept the globe. And they were very useful for a lot of burgeoning movements. Think of burgeoning capitalism. Think of the ideas of Adam Smith. The society is enhanced when the individual looks after number one. We serve everybody when we look after ourselves first. That was the prevailing theory. And my argument in this book is that mindset is bringing us to the brink of extinction now. Because the whole idea of survival of the fittest is actually against nature. Nature has not designed us like that. Nature has designed us with a drive to wholeness. In every part of our bodies, in every part of our society, in every part of our universe, there is a bond, a relationship so profound and integral that one cannot say where one thing ends and another thing begins.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, that’s what in the early chapters you talk about the quantum physics aspect of that and you say it a few times, there’s no such thing as things. I mean that’s quite a radical position which I agree with. So if there are no things, I do appear to be separate from you. I do, but maybe that’s just the illusion of the thingness.
Lynne McTaggart
I think it’s the illusion of the thingness because it’s the illusion of what we’re made of. And a lot of spiritual leaders have understood this over the centuries that we are connected. But if you look at it in scientific terms, this is how it works. Scientists have always been looking for the smallest thing in the universe, the building block out of which everything else derives. And that’s really the scientific method, to take apart the universe like a giant radio and try to look at the component parts. And so the smaller and smaller the part, the more and more they look, the more they find things that are sort of like a nest of Russian dolls. They keep finding smaller things. And when they get to what they think is about the smallest thing, what they find with the subatomic particle is just a little puff of vibratory energy. It’s a nothing. And it’s particularly a nothing, it’s only a potential of something, it only becomes something in relationship. So it’s trading energy with other particles, it’s trading energy with the field, the Zero Point Field, that giant energy field out of which we’re all made. It’s also a relationship with consciousness because it can’t be anything unless it’s observed or measured. So there’s that relationship too. So what we’re talking about when we talk about the smallest thing in the universe isn’t a thing at all, it’s a relationship.
Alan Steinfeld
But what are they looking for with the CERN, you know, the thing in Switzerland, that CERN particle generator? I mean, they must, they say they’re looking for…
Lynne McTaggart
Well, they’re just looking for smaller things. They’re looking for smaller particles. They’re categorizing different particles. You know, they’ve got the whole alphabet soup of particles according to the standard model, which is only a theoretical framework for trying to categorize all these different things that they find. And they’ve got particles with force, particles without force, all sorts of things, a bunch of particles that are only theorized, never actually seen. So what really this gets down to is they can’t find the smallest thing in the universe because it doesn’t exist. There is only relationship, there are no things.
Alan Steinfeld
The other interesting question about that is when you talk about the double slit experiment, which is really the thing that burst open the whole quantum inquiry. And they found that when people were looking at the experiment, it was a wave, and when people weren’t looking, it was a particle. Is that true? Can you recap that a little bit?
Lynne McTaggart
It’s just the opposite, actually. What they found was the double slit experiment sends a subatomic particle like a photon through a machine and it goes through slits, and they will build up a pattern on the wall behind. And what they found is that when no one is looking, it appears like the photon is going through two slits, and so it’s somehow splitting and going through two slits before making a pattern on the far wall. When someone is looking, it seems to go through one slit. And that’s going through both slits at once. And so from that, they theorized that a photon, and by definition all subatomic particles, can be both a wave and a particle at once. But that it’s a smeared out kind of bit of potential. It’s like all possible selves when it’s not observed. When it is observed, it shrinks down to a single entity, a particle, and it becomes a more bullet-like type thing. And that’s how, that’s why scientists have believed that subatomic particles are finally unknowable, but also a relationship, that it needs mind, consciousness, in order to bring this smeared out bit of everything into a single entity.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. Some people call that collapsing the wave function, and solidifying reality.
Lynne McTaggart
Exactly. It turns the potential of something into a something real.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay. So what did Wheeler then discover in his thought experiment, just because that was another ramification to that?
Lynne McTaggart
Well, Wheeler was very interesting because he created a kind of mechanical observer effect. He wondered, what would happen if this thing, he created an apparatus that was like a screen that pulled up, and it acted like an observer. And he found that, and this remember was a thought experiment that ultimately was actually enacted. But he wondered whether or not, if observed by a mechanism, this particle would collapse to a single something. And indeed it did. So it was really Wheeler who came up with the whole idea of the observer effect, and through this thought experiment that ultimately was demonstrated.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, this gets off the course a little bit of your book, but what about reverse causality? When things are looked after backwards, it affects the past. So if those light particles were observed after the fact, and even though it was a wave, shouldn’t they revert to being particles because of this whole idea of reverse causality of time going both directions?
Lynne McTaggart
Well, actually, Alan, that’s a really interesting question because it’s true. There have been some studies looking at that, where they’ve had to shield an experiment from any kind of observation at any time in order to maintain that wave. There were some experiments that I detailed in The Field that were just about that, about forward time, backward time being affected by the observer.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. So if you are the observer in the future and see the results of that experiment, then shouldn’t it always be particles then? Because eventually you have to observe the results of the experiment. I’m just wondering how they clarify that.
Lynne McTaggart
No, because the experiment gets carried out at a finite period of time. And then gets stopped. And if it’s not observed, then it is just as it is. If it is observed during that time, then yes. If you had a structure that was standing and happening all the time and people walked in and out of the room, then you’d have people observing that experiment. But because it is run just at a finite amount of time, that’s all the time that those photons are part of that experiment and would be in superposition, as they call it.
Alan Steinfeld
So I mean, what you’re saying on the scientific level, there is no defined reality until we define it, until we consciously say this is this or that.
Lynne McTaggart
Until we participate in it in any way. And so there’s a, and by we, we mean consciousness. And this gets really tricky, but the real trickiness of it is really the point of my book, which is you can’t look at aspects of the universe in complete isolation. You have to understand all of us, everything in the universe, as a vast intergalactic bond. But the problem is we’re not living that way. We are living completely individualistically, and more and more and more so in the West. And that’s where we’re getting into trouble.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, this is what your book is showing us we have to change. But one more question about that double slit experiment. When they shoot these photon beams, those are particles that you say in a sense can’t exist. Or the whole experiment, if everything’s a wave or nothing or energy, how can they actually shoot individual photons through a slit in the first place?
Lynne McTaggart
Well, they don’t, they just fire it out. They fire it out and they find that it somehow is able to go through both slits. Imagine two holes that are, imagine a fork in a sense, and the two, each a double fork, and each side has a slit in it. So really, if it was just a particle, the photon would go through one side or the other. But it seems to go through both sides when not observed. In fact, it does go through. And that’s the great mystery of it. How could this possibly be? I mean, physicists have clever ways of being able to fire individual photons, but an individual photon isn’t a bullet. Think of it as a little vibrating packet of energy. That’s really what a photon is when unobserved. It’s not anything definable. It’s all possible things.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay. That clears that up in a sense, although it gets so fuzzy when you go down to these fine levels of reality. I mean, everything sort of just disappears into a cloud in that sense. Doesn’t it?
Lynne McTaggart
Well, that’s the problem, because we’re so used to thinking of things as things. You know, that’s why I was saying that there are no such thing as things, because everything is so interrelated, everything exists only in relationship, that it’s hard to really say anything is a thing. You know, even our bodies. Our bodies, we’re so used to thinking of our bodies as the ultimate individuality that we experience, because we think we end with the hairs on our skin. And we think that our body has this unique blueprint that is responsible entirely for us. And that that unique blueprint is what creates us, and it creates us from inside out, from our DNA to our cells to our tissues to our organs and so on. But we now understand that DNA and genes are really like the keys of a piano. And that outside our bodies, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the food we eat, the friends we have, the sum total of how we live our lives, all of this determines whether those keys get played. So actually, those influences which affect atoms above the gene and determine whether it gets expressed, those are the things that turn on genes. We get created in a sense from outside in, from outside our bodies inside. And we are only who we are because of our environment from outside.
Alan Steinfeld
But it also does mean we’re just subject to our environment, we have some control. Like you talk about in The Intention Experiment, we feed that intention back into that understanding of the environment as we interact with it. Right?
Lynne McTaggart
Oh yeah, we’re affecting it. We are changing our environment with intention, etc. It is sending consciousness, it is changing us. It’s a real feedback loop. It’s a relationship. It’s a bond.
Alan Steinfeld
It’s a bond. So we’re at the effect of the environment but then the environment’s also at the effect of our intention. So I mean this of course has huge implications in how we can change our whole society like you’ve been saying, but how do you see it now working? What would you create structures? What structures would you create to create a different world? How would you go about instituting this bond awareness into a greater culture?
Lynne McTaggart
Well, it starts really with four things I think. One of the things it really starts with, Alan, is the whole idea of seeing differently. I mean, we have been trained to operate a certain way. We’ve been trained to think a certain way. We’ve been trained to perceive a certain way because we’ve been imbued with this idea of separateness, of our own separateness and the separateness of things, and also the competitive nature of things. That, you know, you’ve got to get out there. There’s just not enough out there, so you better damn well get out there first. We’ve been so imbued by all of that. That pretty much colors how we see. And it starts from the time we’re very tiny. If you were taught to read, most of us were taught with books like Fun with Dick and Jane. Now those books really talk about the individual getting up to something. You know, look Jane, look Dick, run. Or something like that. It’s an individual doing something hilarious. And that ultimately colors how we see. And we’re also taught to honor individualism and achievement to such a degree and to be individualistic very, very early and distinguish ourselves. The Japanese, for instance, get something very different. They get a primer that reads like this: Big brother is sitting with little brother. Little brother loves big brother. Big brother takes care of little brother. So they’re taught about relationship from a young age. And so ultimately they see something very different from us. If we were to show an American and a Japanese person the Mona Lisa, for instance, the painting at the Louvre, the American would see the thing. They would see the face, the very epicenter of the painting. The Japanese would see the integrated background. They would see more of the relationship between the background and the face. So ultimately this becomes how we see the world. And we here in the West, so busy looking for the thing, cannot see beyond that. And that also means we can’t see beyond us. We see everything in relation to ‘I’. We see everything in relation to ‘what’s in it for me’. And we stop being able to see. We’re so used to looking for things, we can’t see holistically. So we miss all kinds of stuff. Westerners have a terrible inattentional blindness, as they call it. All you have to do is look at pilots flying in seasoned pilots in a simulator. When they’re given information about a flight path on the screen, they’re so busy looking at that, they often times miss the fact that they’re about to land on another simulated plane. And that happens to us in our lives. Because we’re so busy focusing on the thing. It just trained our brains like that. So one of the things that I’m looking at is very much brain training that enables us to see the whole. And I discuss some of it in The Bond that enables us to begin to see much more detail in our lives and to see integrated detail.
Alan Steinfeld
What kind of exercise would help us do that? I mean, as you say…
Lynne McTaggart
A real simple one, Alan, is daily practice integrating mindfulness into our lives. You know, just coming into your body and checking your five senses while you’re doing something. You know, while you’re eating your breakfast, while you’re eating your granola and drinking your orange juice. Just come into your five senses and start paying real attention to what it feels like, what it tastes like, what it sounds like. What does it feel like? What does it look like? All of those senses and just really focus on them all. And try that at different times of the day when you’re going to work, when you’re conversing with someone. Just get focused into your five senses. But really acute awareness of your five senses. And scientific studies have shown that that kind of practice will begin enabling you to see much more of the whole than you would in a matter of weeks.
Alan Steinfeld
It also seems to activate more of our right brain potential, which is more of our intuition, and also seeing a bigger picture. So we’re not just seeing, like you’re saying, the individual trees, we’re seeing the forest. We’re taking in a bigger picture. And I think when we do that, then we look out into the world and we see we are connected. We need to take care of the planet and each other if we’re going to evolve.
Lynne McTaggart
Absolutely. Absolutely. And that as you say, it tunes you into your intuitive senses. It turns off your neocortex. And it hooks that up a lot more with the intuitive and more primitive parts of your brain. And I say primitive in quotes, they’re oftentimes the intelligent parts of your brain. But our neocortex, the problem with it is it’s the high road part of the brain. We’ve got a low road and a high road. The low road is the immediate hit, like the amygdala, the older part of the brain, the more emotional part of the brain, where we get intuitive information much more quickly. And then 11 seconds later it travels to the high road, the neocortex, where we try to work out the meaning of something. And oftentimes we get that information and that also limits our ability to really see the whole. So some of the other practices are about turning that off, turning off routine, turning off the kinds of things that stop us from seeing the whole.
Alan Steinfeld
But what you’re really saying is we need to restructure our whole culture, starting with how we raise our children. And the integration of the new sciences, like you go in detail in all your books, is how we need to start to structure a new culture.
Lynne McTaggart
That’s absolutely right, Alan. And you know, it sounds so daunting. It sounds very daunting to all of us because we’re all sitting here feeling like we’re on the precipice anyway. You know, we all get the sense we’re in crisis now in every regard: financial crisis, terrorist crisis, ecological crisis, foreign debt crisis, you name it crisis. And we all feel something very powerful and palpable is ending, and we keep trying to get a handle on this. And we have all the pundits saying it’s the end of capitalism as we know it, or it’s the end of oil use, or it’s the end of food because it’s the end of oil, or even with the Mayan calendar ending, it’s the beginning of the end of the world. But you know, for me, what’s really ending is this false god, this false sense of who we really are. And I think this is the path to a new evolution. In fact, the only path is letting go of this false sense of ourselves.
Alan Steinfeld
The false sense that the individual is all that’s important, that it’s just me, me, me. That’s the false sense you’re saying?
Lynne McTaggart
Yeah. The sense that we need to compete to survive, that we need to be so individualistic, that honoring the individual is the real way to go. I mean, it’s and even more than that, that living the kind of winner takes all mentality, that we have so much and divided so much and permeating so much of our society. That all has to go. But then we think, oh my god, this is such a big daunting thing. And here we have our politicians, they can’t even talk to each other. How are we going to affect all of this? And the real purpose of The Bond is to say that actually, one of the really interesting things about the new science is to show exactly how connected we are and how we can use that to change. By this I mean the following. We know from a lot of evidence that we are highly contagious with each other. Because there is this great will to connect in nature. Nature, there’s always been this belief nature has a will to power and domination. Nietzsche said that, and so many of the scientists say that. And that we were born to be selfish. But actually, all the evidence shows the opposite. That nature has a drive to wholeness and has designed us only to be to connect, to share, care, and be fair. And one of the other things is to be aware of each other. And we’re highly aware of each other. We have this compulsive need to agree. We experience each other through mirror neurons, which are… when I watch you and I listen to you and you have an emotion or you do an action, a mirror neuron fires in me that enables me to have the exact same emotion or action as though I were carrying it out. We’ve been made to mimic. Not to feel like, but to actually feel what you’re feeling.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, I think that’s actually how we understand emotions in the first place. When I mimic your facial expression, I feel what it feels like to have what you’re feeling. So I’m understanding emotion and understanding human behavior in terms of this mimicry or this neuron resonance.
Lynne McTaggart
Yes. Now the other thing that happens is we find emotions. People find other people contagious in so many ways. Happy emotions easily and quickly affect an entire room. Irritated emotions, unhappy emotions equally affect an entire room. But they also affect networks. So networks are friends and friends of friends and connections through a network of friends or relations. So if I’m happy, I’m more likely to have happy friends. Not because I self-select happy people, but because of the happy spread, the naturally happy spread of people. So my happiness will go a certain degree down the network, by degrees they mean my friends, my friends’ friends, my friends’ friends’ friends. Similarly loneliness, even obesity. If I mindlessly eat, I’m more likely to make my friends mindlessly eat. That’s how infectious we are. So the great thing about this is change that I’m talking about can actually occur from bottom up. Because we are so infectious. I’ll give you an example now. There are… and this is an example of our real need for fairness and to take turns. And this is a big part of my book and also it’s a big part of what I’m doing at the moment. I’ve launched a fairness campaign. It’s called The Fairness Campaign. Because life is feeling one of the outgrowths of this me-first mentality has been to create this absolutely manifestly unfair society in America and all of the West right now. We’re at our most unfair in history. And this also is against nature. Because we have ‘it’s not fair’ buttons in our brain. We were made to be fair and to take turns. And we actually acutely feel it when we’ve taken too much or too little. I don’t mean across the board sameness. I don’t mean socialism.
Alan Steinfeld
No, I know what you mean. Yeah, I mean about things being fair. People have never had problems with people having more than them as long as it’s well deserved. It’s when things are unfair, when people at the top of society block opportunity for others, when bankers, for instance, who engineered a giant global recession are paid record bonuses for creating situations that put so many millions of people out of work. That’s considered unfair.
Lynne McTaggart
We have a basic integrity, I think, within the human sense is also what you’re saying. Yeah. We’re hardwired for this stuff. We’re hardwired to connect this way, Alan. So actually what I’m saying, and this is, I’m bringing it back to my point of how tough this is to fix. I don’t think it’s something that happens from the top. What I’m thinking about is the change and the change agents that happen through little activities in little circles. And here’s an example.
Alan Steinfeld
It’s sort of like homeopathy in a sense, right?
Lynne McTaggart
I like that analogy a lot. I like that whole idea. That’s great. Well, think of it this way. Our need for fairness. It’s really interesting. Our need for fairness is also about reciprocation. We expect everybody to take turns. That’s so integral to our nature. And they found this in game theory, with a game called the public goods game. It goes like this. We have a group of people. We’re all given ten dollars. We’re all said we can put a certain amount of that ten bucks into a pot that represents the public good. And then it all gets redistributed. So the people who run the game will redistribute it and the actual point of the game is the more generous everybody is, the more everybody gets. So initially everybody is generous. Everybody puts a lot in. At least 50, 60, 70%. But then there’s always inevitably a few freeloaders who want to know what’s in it for me. So they don’t put in so much. And so this starts pissing off all the rest of the people and so they stop contributing so much. And then ultimately nobody puts money in. So at the moment, that’s pretty much what our nation is like now. Actually most nations in the West. A little bit like a public goods game that nobody’s willing to play. No one’s coming together. No one’s contributing. Everybody is just polarized. And no one’s putting themselves out. But the interesting thing is in these games, they found that all it takes is one or two strong reciprocators, change agents, to change the whole game and the culture of selfishness around. I will give you an example of that. I’ll give you an example of this one woman who was in a culture of selfishness at her work. She was just really frustrated by people and their usual tactics at work, elbowing everybody out, being very selfish. So she decided one day she was just going to leave change in the Coke machine. You know, we’ve all heard about these little pay it forward things. But this was really interesting because every day she did this and she left a little note saying ‘your Coke’s been paid for. Pay it forward.’ And so this is what happened. People were totally freaked out by this. They created spies at the Coke machine. They created a neighborhood watch scheme to take turns trying to figure out who was the secret Santa. So she got wind of this and before she got found out, she upped her ante and moved to another floor and started leaving donuts. And every day she would leave donuts with a little note too. This action changed the whole culture of that business. People started talking about it for weeks. People were demonstrated, what happened was it resonated in people, it struck a very deep, deep chord. Because as I say, we’ve been hardwired for all of this. All you need is one little reminder of this and it starts changing the game. And so one of the messages of The Bond is starting to change your own behavior, your own ability to see, your own ability to relate to other people so that you’re not looking for what’s in it for me, you start honoring the relationship and start looking at that as the entity and not the individual. And when you do, you’re much more able to see the, take an aerial perspective where differences don’t matter and also you more easily can change the game. And this is why I’m doing the fairness campaign, is to start reminding people of fairness principles so that not so that we try it from top down, but we try it from bottom up. And you see what happens in your own circle, your own neighborhood. And see what happens.
Alan Steinfeld
Well it goes beyond morality. I mean there’s all this moral ideas we get from religion but it’s not about that. It’s about connecting to who we are as bigger beings, as not separate. So when I contribute to the whole I’m also adding to myself. Like the cells of a body where you don’t exist in isolation. It also goes along those principles that Marshall Rosenberg talked about in non-violent communication. He says we all have needs for love, but we also have a need to give love. That’s a basic hardwired human instinct is to give and to contribute to the benefit of another being. That’s in us. And that’s exactly what you’re saying here. So how do we then take that… is it just doing these small acts or is there… in your fairness campaign, but how do we start to change countries and the way the world is run and capitalist organizations and people that exploit the earth and… do you have any ideas about…
Lynne McTaggart
Where do we start? Where do we start? We start our revolution from within. I mean this whole… a good chunk of The Bond is a toolkit. Is a… is a beginning discussion and toolkit and blueprint in my view for a new world. I mean very much I wanted to start with a basic clarion call and also to talk about the tools that we need to to use. And I think there are four. We need to start perceiving the world very differently. And other than something for our own exploitation. And I talk about the tools in there. We need to start relating to people very differently. So you know, you can hear I’m talking about a revolution from within and then a revolution among your whole cluster, your small cluster. We have to start relating to people very differently so we’re not, as I say, we’re honoring the relationship when we connect with someone. We’re saying to ourselves things like, ‘what do I have to be to allow this other person to thrive?’ And by honoring the relationship, it’s not just about that feel-good thing. It changes the whole currency of everything. Everything. And I’m going to give you an example in a moment. But another thing too is we have to, we have to learn to organize differently. Because one of the problems is with sameness and individuality is it breeds individuality, it breeds separateness. And what we’ve got now is we don’t have any neighborhoods anymore. You know, we don’t even have workplaces as much anymore. We have a lot of disconnected people telecommuting. We don’t have that sense of connection anymore. What we have is a group of isolated people who look for other people just like them. And so you know, the fastest growing neighborhood in the West is a gated community. Which is people who want to hide behind a gate with people just like them.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah. I know, my mother lives in one. So I know. You know what it’s like.
Lynne McTaggart
And you know the point is that we are losing the ability to connect with people who are not just like us. And that’s why we’re seeing this vast polarization. So one of the things I talk about that’s a very simple thing to do… I give you an example of this, Alan, with one of the most beloved psychological studies of all time. It’s called the Robbers Cave experiment. And this is what happened. 1950s. A group of 12-year-old boys were sent to summer camp. They traveled in two buses. And they were encouraged to create separate identities for themselves. The Rattlers and the Eagles. And they were also encouraged to create other aspects of identity, flags, etc. And they had separate living quarters. And then were engaged in highly competitive games by the camp counselors, who by the way were all psychologists in disguise. These were in the days before informed consent. Right. So after a while they didn’t have to stoke any competition. With those highly competitive games the boys started killing each other. They began ripping up each other’s flags, they invaded each other’s living quarters and stole things, they beat each other up, and no amount of getting to know you evenings could mollify the effect. So then the camp counselors created a series of crises that could only be alleviated by the collective efforts of everyone. So they put a big boulder in the water supply and all the boys had to work together to remove it. So here’s what happened. After a while the boys started talking to each other. They started sitting together. They started eating together. They started putting their arms around each other and befriending each other. And at the very end they unanimously voted to have the entire lot travel in the same bus on the way home. So this was the classic example of what’s called a superordinate goal. Which is a goal that can only be achieved by the collective efforts of everyone involved. And people involved in conflict and big conflicts have found that this sort of thing, the practical way to move the game forward brings people together hugely. I mean it’s a variation of barn building, you know?
Alan Steinfeld
Do you think some huge crisis has to come to the planet in order for that to happen?
Lynne McTaggart
No, I’m talking about a bottom up approach, Alan, where people just start creating a little effect in their neighborhoods. An example: town in Oklahoma, one of the forgotten neighborhoods of America, couldn’t get any clean water. And so they couldn’t get federal money for it. So the neighborhood got together and started digging themselves. The men got out there with their shovels and their pickaxes and the women started cooking lunch for them. And after a while they got their clean water, but they also got the community they never thought they had. You know, during the royal wedding recently, there were block parties all around England. And children were interviewed afterward and they said, ‘Can we please do this again? Because it doesn’t happen anymore.’ In urban areas, Portland, Oregon, group of small individuals decided there was a new plan for a big highway near the river and they wanted more park less highway. So they banded together with, called themselves the Riverfront for People. And they stopped the highway, but they also created this huge connection and created a great deal of activism and close community that persists to this day. And there’s a good reason for it, Alan, because studies have shown that when people do something together with a singular purpose, their brain waves start operating in sync. And you know, people who fire together wire together basically.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. No, I think that’s a very important point and so if we fire together as a planet eventually, you know, we can live in a whole different world and a different reality in a functional harmonious place. I mean it’s the possibility exists.
Lynne McTaggart
Well the possibility exists, but it’s got to happen from the ground up and remember the whole idea of ripple effect. One, it’s not only happiness that affects people down a network, but any kind of activity that is generosity or altruism affects a whole network. Scientists have also shown one good act of generosity, one positive act goes three degrees down a network. My friends, my friends’ friends, my friends’ friends’ friends. And imagine that rippling out. You’re talking about a viral Facebook effect. And so what we’re really talking about with science with all of this science is that our natural tendency is to affect each other. Our natural tendency is to want fairness, giving. We succeed only when we share, care, and fair, and are fair. We are weak when we compete. So…
Alan Steinfeld
Did you make that up? Is that your little slogan? I mean that’s cute. I mean.
Lynne McTaggart
Share, care, and be fair. Absolutely. That’s my little slogan for the fairness campaign. But the whole point is it can happen in little communities and those little clusters, your neighborhood, your circle of friends, your business, your office, that’s where it starts. You start bringing that together with a little goal where people come together. They come together permanently then, and then that has a ripple effect on other places until it’s affecting your whole community. As it did in Portland. Until it starts affecting your whole state. But the whole thing is that this kind of new behavior can be infectious, is infectious. And so what I’m really saying is it doesn’t start with these giant meetings and giant political ideas, although that would be nice. It starts with you and me and just the simple belief that it doesn’t have to be like this anymore. Not for one more day.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. No, I get that and I think that’s a great effort of the book or the great ideas behind this book and why it’s so important is like what you’ve been saying, just do a small thing, it will have a ripple effect of everyone around you, on your family, on your friends, on your community, one small little act of kindness, random acts of kindness. And cooperation. It is so simple is basically what you’re saying. It’s simple to change the world but it has to start with us, with our simple actions, our immediate actions.
Lynne McTaggart
But it also, it also has to take, I mean, as I say, it also requires… I mean that’s the effect we can have. But we also first have to change who we are. And one of the real purposes of the book is to say you know, we have to change our competitive mindset. We have to change, this is us as an individual and what I hope to do is affect people one person at a time. And we have to change the way we look at the world, because right now we see it in pieces. We see it as what’s in it for me. We have to change the way we relate to people and connect with people. We have to change the way we cluster together in groups. So again, it’s not just about sameness, and we have to change what our purpose is. So those are the real areas of change and those are, that is it’s hoped the beginnings of a blueprint for change, but the change is a revolution of one.
Alan Steinfeld
So this connecting through the bond, the bond, connecting through the space between us is Lynne McTaggart’s new book. And is there another step after that? I mean I’m looking down the line. Okay, we have the bond, we have this change. What else, what else is kind of percolating in there for you? What else are you thinking about after… I mean of course this is huge, but what else are you thinking about?
Lynne McTaggart
A curriculum. I mean, what comes on from here is really my curriculum. I’ve been doing a lot of study about deeper, you know, how do we learn, those are the four main areas I think that it starts with, you know, perceiving differently. I mean that requires a lot of brain training, you know, learning to relate. And relating to people, that’s also pretty huge. I mean right now all we need to all we know is about learning and interacting for personal gain. And after this is, and this whole idea of clustering together and the way we, you know, the way we act. I mean if I could have an effect on a few neighborhoods, I’d be really happy because there are no neighborhoods anymore. If I could spark a lot of individual kind of behavior. What I hope to do is create little pod pods, bond pods. So what I’m talking about is little groups of people who are wedded to this idea of change who begin working together and working together for these common goals, these superordinate goals. A lot of my workshops, I just ask people, okay, I want you to decide between your little group, what kinds of things are you going to do? I also do these intention healing circles with people where we get together in a little group of eight to twelve. I’ve been experimenting a lot with small groups and amazing miraculous things happen. People send, Alan, it’s just been incredible. I’ve been observing this for three years now with all of my workshops and what ends up happening is the person being sent the healing, we have story after story of an immediate healing. And also the people in the group sending the healing also have a remarkable effect. So for instance, we had somebody in a group recently with a bad back. Everybody sent healing to her bad back. You know, an intention, just a healing intention. All the same intention, all clustered together, all holding hands, all doing my intention exercises from the Intention Experiment. And what ended up happening is she immediately felt incredibly better, but then three of the people in the group who had bad backs also felt better. She the recipient had a bad right knee. Her right knee felt tingly and better. One of the people in the group who had a bad right knee had super tingling for a while, felt worse, and then felt better. And we see this over and over and over again. So I’ve concluded after this research, Alan, that what we’re not witnessing is simply the power of intention, although that I’m sure plays a part. We’re witnessing really the power of community. And what people do is, I mean it’s very emotional, very connected, people feel this very palpable energy in this group and what they say is ‘I felt so supported.’ So there’s this experience of hooking up in a sense to the mothership that we just don’t feel in our separateness. And so I was pretty proud of this, I thought ‘Oh wow, I’ve discovered something amazing.’ Until I started reading about the Essenes and found that the Essenes and even Jesus, before he was, you know, Jesus, would use these healing intention circles, exactly the same. So it’s those kinds of activities I’m encouraging in my bond pods, so that people getting together in small groups become small groups for change, little change agents and that it doesn’t take much to start changing the game, internally and externally.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. There is a resonance between human beings and human beings in a group like you say that fire and wire together and if we can then affect that connection and we uplift each other. I mean, this is the future, this is the only hope for the future I think we have as a planet, is to encourage and raise through intention and vibration and field dynamics, the whole or the group or the small group. I mean, that’s absolutely. So I think it’s important, this book right now. Thank you, Lynne.
Lynne McTaggart
Well, thank you Alan. I hope so and I hope people understand that it isn’t, you know, it feels so overwhelming, but that they shouldn’t don’t worry about the big stuff. It’ll take care of itself. Worry about your immediate little circle. Worry about a group of eight to twelve, you know, get involved, most people are part of a group like that, and that’s your group, that’s your starting point.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, I think that is a good place to start. I mean I’m always looking at the big picture but I think what you’re saying is very important to start locally, you know, and I think that will be a global effect. The local is the global, you know, it’s that fractal, it’s that relationship. Just one final question though, if there are no things, individualities, if there’s only connection or relationship, are there really any people, are there really, is there really me and you or are these just also illusions of a consciousness that seems to fragment but really isn’t?
Lynne McTaggart
That’s a great question, Alan. I think there are people, I mean I think consciousness is experiencing itself through us, you know, so we are part of a bigger whole. I mean, you know, I like to think of it as the raisins in a cake or something like that where we’re, you know, we’re experiencing, and consciousness is living and experiencing through us. And we are experiencing what we think of as individuality through that. But that ultimately there isn’t. And we know this because we know consciousness doesn’t die. We know all of those experiences with near-death experiences and coma victims who are still totally aware, and all of those things that give us an indication that consciousness doesn’t die. And also through, as we see, this model of nature and so many different examples of the fact that there is this will to wholeness that we can only hope to really understand who we are by understanding ourselves as an intergalactic superorganism. Once we do… an intergalactic superorganism…
Alan Steinfeld
Yes, yes, well you talk about taking apart the radio. If you take apart the radio, you’re never going to find the signal, right?
Lynne McTaggart
Exactly, exactly. We are the signal. Yeah, and I think the point is really just to hook up to that bigger idea as many cultures do, where you are considering your actions, you’re considering what you perceive, your relationships in terms of something bigger than just I. And once you do, you change that perspective from me to us, then you start experiencing what you really are all about. And what other cultures understand, ancient cultures understand, it’s just us.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. Right. No, that’s true, it is just us, and this is all we’re here to really understand in a bigger way that it’s our evolution, it’s who, yeah, it’s where we’re going. And that’s why I think this book and other books that are coming out at this point show us that there is only one way to move forward. It’s, you know, what’s so important about this is that you’re giving us the science that people need in order to integrate a kind of spiritual understanding into their lives. So that’s what’s so important about your work and has been over the last couple of decades, I feel. So I look forward to seeing you in New York. Lynne will be speaking at the New York Open Center on June 7th, Tuesday June 7th, and you can go to theopencenter.com to get tickets and order tickets. She’s also doing something at The New School, right? And you’re also doing a special fundraiser for FIONS, F-I-O-N-S, you can look up that online and get tickets for that, fions.org. Thanks Lynne, it’s been very nice talking to you. I look forward to seeing you.
Lynne McTaggart
Well thank you Alan, it’s been wonderful as always connecting with you and exploring all of these wonderful ideas and you know, I look forward to coming to New York.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, and we’ll continue the conversation because as I really get the sense of your purpose behind this, it’s even much bigger than I feel what comes out in the book, because you have a true intention in creating something that people can benefit on all levels of society. So thank you.
Lynne McTaggart
Absolutely. Well, it was, you know, it was supposed to be the first aspect of tools for a new world. And I think what everybody’s been wanting is tools. You know, we’ve talked, as I say, we’ve talked the science for many years, now it’s time to walk the science with a new vision and a new way forward.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay, and your website again that you…
Lynne McTaggart
Is www.thebond.net.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. And The Bond is now at your bookstore everywhere, I would say.
Lynne McTaggart
Absolutely.
Alan Steinfeld
Alright, thanks Lynne, I appreciate it. I’ll talk to you soon.