The Field:  The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe by Lynne McTaggart.  New York, NY:  Harper, 2008 (2002).  Biblio.; index; notes; 5.3 x 8 in.; 268 pp.; $13.95 (paper).

Reviewed by Timothy White. Reprinted fromShaman's Drum, Number 78.

The Field by journalist Lynne McTaggart is a thought-provoking investigation of research involving a new scientific paradigm which posits that the so-called empty space or vacuum permeating the universe is not dead space but a vast quantum field of microscopic vibrations—sometimes called the zero-point field—that appears to be alive and imbued with consciousness. Although the book does not directly address shamanic practices, I recommend it as an important resource because many of McTaggart’s observations seem to confirm fundamental mystical and shamanic paradigms.   As a relative stranger to the world of quantum physics, I am unable to assess the impeccability of her scientific sources, but the research discoveries she examines resonate well with my experiential understanding of how shamanic practices work.

Inspired by clinical studies confirming the efficacy of homeopathy, acupuncture, and spiritual healing, McTaggart originally embarked on a quest to see if any cutting-edge quantum scientists could explain how these energy medicines work.  Among the scientists she interviewed were former astronaut Edgar Mitchell, electrical engineer and inventor Hal Puthoff, experimental physicist Dean Radin, laser physicist Russell Targ, biophysicist Fritz-Albert Popp, and transpersonal psychologist William Braud.  Gradually, by connecting the dots being charted by these pioneers in biological research, psychology, and quantum physics, McTaggart documents the practical significance of this revolutionary new paradigm that seems to bridge the gap between modern science and esoteric spiritual beliefs. 

One of McTaggart’s journalistic gifts is her ability to describe complicated quantum theories in nontechnical terms and metaphoric images that should help lay readers better grasp the significance of those theories, as well as their relevance in our lives.  For example, in chapter 2, “The Sea of Light,” she succinctly explains how physicist Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle led to the discovery that the “empty space” in the universe is actually “a seething maelstrom of subatomic particles fleetingly popping in and out of existence.” She introduces Hal Puthoff’s unifying zero-point field (ZPF) theory, which posits—in McTaggart’s words—that the subatomic universe is essentially “a sea of motion—a quantum sea of light.”  She explains Puthoff’s mathematical proof that the seemingly stable state of matter depends upon electrons constantly exchanging energy with the ZPF in “a sort of self-generating feedback loop across the cosmos.”  Then she reframes his discovery in everyday language: “Electrons get their energy to keep going without slowing down because they are refueling by tapping into these fluctuations of empty space.” 

Some readers may question the practical relevance of the ZPF theory to shamanic practice, but I believe that it provides a sound scientific explanation for certain paranormal phenomena—such as remote viewing, telepathy, precognitive dreams, and spiritual healing—that mainstream scientists have tended to dismiss out of hand.  As McTaggart points out, quantum physics has established that the ZPF is a vibrant force flowing through the universe, able to communicate at speeds faster than light.  Moreover, as she suggests, there are intriguing parallels between the ZPF and certain classical metaphysical notions, such as the Chinese belief in a life force, or qi, found in all beings and all matter. 

In chapter 3, “Beings of Light,” McTaggart explores research by German biophysicist Fritz-Albert Popp and others which suggests that our human bodies are essentially specialized energy fields, or packets of quantum energy, that are constantly exchanging information in the form of energy waves with the ZPF.  While studying how monomorphic genetic codes in DNA result in the development of specialized body parts, Popp discovered that the molecules in blood cells respond to certain electromagnetic frequencies.  Knowing that, on average, each cell undergoes some 100,000 chemical reactions per second and these processes are replicated instantaneously in millions of similar cells, Popp realized that simple chemical collisions between molecules would be much too slow to account for the coherent biological behaviors exhibited in living beings. He proposed that DNA may communicate through some type of “biophoton emissions” stored in it. Eventually, Popp was able to demonstrate not only that the biological processes of the body are orchestrated by biophoton emissions connected to DNA, but that these processes can be influenced by exposure to electromagnetic fields.

Posing a rhetorical question—“What is the chemical or genetic process that tells certain cells to grow into a hand and not a foot?”—McTaggart turns to the cutting-edge formative causation theory of British biologist Rupert Sheldrake.  Based on his observations of nature, Sheldrake hypothesized that “the forms of self-organizing living things—everything from molecules and organisms to societies and even entire galaxies—are shaped by morphic fields.”  Although Sheldrake was able to verify the effects of morphic fields, his theory didn’t explain how these fields could store and communicate information.  Fortunately, a likely explanation was available in Puthoff’s ZPF feedback loop.

Popp’s biophysical research had shown that living things emit an ongoing current of photons and that organisms of the same species actively exchange photons.  He realized that this exchange might allow communication between cells, so he began to study whether plant extracts could change the character of biophoton emissions of cancer cells.  He discovered that some plant extracts increased the photon emissions of cancer cells, making them more deadly, while other extracts—particularly mistletoe—seemed to restabilize the photon emissions of tumor cells to normal levels. 

Popp then proposed that electromagnetic signaling might also explain the efficacy of acupuncture.  In fact, studies have shown that when acupuncture points are stimulated at low frequencies, the body releases painkilling endorphins and the adrenal steroid cortisol, but that, at high frequencies, it releases mood-regulating neurotransmitters such as serotonin.

In chapter 4, “The Language of the Cell,” McTaggart visits the research of French medical biologist Jacques Benveniste, who discovered that highly diluted solutions of allergens continue to produce allergic reactions in white blood cells.  His research showed that water could “record” and store the electromagnetic signature frequencies of molecules, a phenomenon that might explain the efficacy of homeopathic medicines, but Benveniste took his studies a step further.  By digitally recording and replaying, off and on, the specific molecular electromagnetic signals of a substance to biological systems sensitive to the substance, Benveniste and his associates demonstrated that biological chain reactions don’t rely on chemical collision but on electromagnetic signaling at sub-auditory frequencies.  For McTaggart, this was a key discovery helping explain how energy medicines work.

In chapter 5, “Resonating with the World,” McTaggart reviews neurosurgeon Karl Pribram’s research into the nature of conscious perceptions.  After determining that our perceptions aren’t processed as internally projected images, Pribram proposed that they are encoded in some form of holographic waves.  He theorized that when we see something, our retinas are stimulated by wave interference patterns that are relayed to the brain, which distributes those patterns to successive sets of neurons, ultimately allowing us to envision the patterns as three-dimensional images.  His research found evidence that all our senses operate by analyzing frequencies, and he proposed that the brain talks to itself and to the rest of the body in the language of wave interference—the primal language of the ZPF.  McTaggart sums up Pribram’s discovery in less technical jargon: “We  perceive an object by ‘resonating’ with it, getting ‘in synch’ with it.  To know the world is literally to be on its wavelength.”    

Pribram’s holographic mind theory was confirmed by Walter Schempp, a mathematician turned radiologist, who revolutionized the construction of the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, which is used to take pictures of the brain and other soft body tissues.  Building on the fact that the MRI machine used a magnetic field to get the water molecules in the brain to spin and then give off radiation as they slowed down, Schempp’s machine recorded the information encoded in the radiation waves, which it then used to construct a three-dimensional image of the brain.  Based on his discoveries, Schempp developed a theory of “quantum holography,” which proposes that the quantum fluctuations of the ZPF can carry all sorts of information about objects, and that this information can be holographically reassembled, as in the MRI, into three-dimensional images.

Drawing on other bioelectronic research, McTaggart shows that human consciousness is not restricted to our brains but is a global phenomenon that occurs everywhere in the body, through a process called “superradiance.”  She endorses Schempp’s theory that memory doesn’t reside in our brain but is stored in the body’s electromagnetic field.  More importantly, she points out that quantum scientists are now proposing that our cognitive processes may result from our ongoing exchanges with the ZPF.  For example, she introduces system theorist Ervin Laszlo’s radical theory that the brain is basically a retrieval and read-out mechanism that taps into the ultimate storage medium—the zero-point field.   While acknowledging that these theories have yet to be verified scientifically, McTaggart perceptively sums up the revolutionary implication of the ZPF paradigm—the probability that human consciousness is capable of exchanging information with other fields of information flowing through the ZPF.

In part 2, “The Extended Mind,” McTaggart reviews some cutting-edge scientific studies of paranormal phenomena.  In chapter 6, “The Creative Observer,” she describes the development of several highly technical machines designed to test parapsychology phenomena.  She describes at length the work of physicist Helmut Schmidt, who developed a random number generator (RNG) controlled by the random nature of radioactive atomic decay, in order to see if people could telepathically influence the patterns generated by the machine. After working with Schmidt’s RNG machine, engineer and physicist Robert Jahn developed a more portable machine, the random event generator (REG), which he used to test whether people could influence randomly produced positive and negative electronic pulses.  After this research produced small but statistically significant results, Jahn developed an ArtREG that randomly switched back and forth between two engaging art images on a computer screen.  While testing if subjects could will the more frequent appearance of one or the other of the images, Jahn discovered an intriguing trend—that the greatest statistical deviation from chance occurred when the images contained archetypal religious iconography and dreamlike imagery. McTaggart suggests that he managed to show that, at least on the subatomic level, there was such a thing as mind over matter, and that “the unconscious mind somehow had the capability of communicating with the subtangible physical world—the quantum world of all possibility.”

In chapter 7, “Sharing Dreams,” McTaggart reviews the extrasensory research of transpersonal psychologist William Braud, who was studying whether intention could have any effect on human cells, particularly those of the immune system.  Building on psychologist Charles Tart’s extrasensory studies, Braud devised a test to see if one person—a receiver—could feel when an observer, located in an isolated room, was staring at him or her over a closed-circuit video system.  Interestingly, he found that electrodermal activity increased significantly during the staring segments even if the receiver wasn’t consciously aware of the staring.  In slightly different tests, Braud found that if the test subjects knew each other or got used to looking at each other, the remote receivers showed less electrodermal activity when they were being stared at.  He decided to see if the effects of being watched would be stronger in people who were agitated, and his tests showed that those subjects were more receptive to being influenced than others.  

Concerned that people could be manipulated by others sending negative thoughts—as in curses or sorcery—Braud repeated his staring tests but asked half the receivers to visualize creating a protective shield or safety barrier in order to shield themselves against the influence of two senders.  He found that the shielded group showed far less electrodermal effects than those who did not shield themselves. 

While conducting a meta-analysis of studies investigating the effect of intention on other living things, Braud found ample evidence that human intention could affect bacteria and yeasts, plants, animals, and human cellular preparations, and even that one set of people could successfully affect the eye movements, breathing, and brain rhythms of another set.  During his meta-analysis, he noticed that tests seemed to work best when human receivers relied on right-brain functioning and when the subjects practiced some sort of relaxation technique prior to the test.  In his own remote staring studies, Braud had noticed that the extrasensory communication often seemed to occur subconsciously.  In subsequent tests, he found that his telepathy experiments produced enhanced results when they were conducted using a ganzfeld protocol, which reduces the receiver’s extraneous sensory input.

Until the discovery of the ZPF, most early ESP research had been modeled around the idea that it worked like a mental radio, with one subject sending thoughts to another.  In contrast, quantum physicist David Bohm theorized that all information was present in some invisible domain or higher reality, and that useful information could be called up at times of need, through dreams, intuitions, and feelings.  Based on his own studies, Braud proposed that ESP might involve a blend of the two processes.  Interestingly, some telepathy studies conducted in Mexico discovered, through EEG readings of the participants, that the brain waves of the sender and receiver tended to synchronize, with the most cohesive brain-wave patterns prevailing.  Braud’s studies also found that when two people exhibited “synchronized” bandwidths, the subject with the greater degree of coherence tended to realign the patterns of the less organized recipient.  These discoveries suggested that when information patterns are exchanged through the ZPF, they should begin to align with the field’s more coherent order—a phenomenon recognized in shamanic healing, which uses rituals to help the patient realign to the higher, natural order.

In chapter 8, “The Extended Eye,” McTaggart describes several of the classic remote viewing experiments conducted by Hal Puthoff and his colleague laser physicist Russell Targ, at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Palo Alto, California.   These studies, which grabbed the CIA’s attention and funding, established that remote viewing worked, albeit sometimes in imperfect ways, and that some humans could “see” or gain access to detailed information at virtually any distance.  CIA funding was dropped after it became clear that remote viewing sometimes picked up information from the past or even from the future, and therefore wasn’t time sensitive.  What Puthoff realized was that the remote viewers weren’t seeing an actual scene—as if their minds had been transported to it—but they were seeing information about the scene that had been encoded in quantum fluctuations of the ZPF.  In fact, Puthoff concluded that tapping into the quantum fluctuations of the ZPF could, theoretically, give us access to a universe of information, and that the greatest obstacles to retrieving desired information would be the challenge of zeroing in on a subject and filtering out a myriad of other distracting fields.

One of the important contributions of the SRI studies was the researchers’ development of guidelines for improving remote viewing skills. One interesting discovery was that the accuracy of remote viewing tests was highest when there was “a relaxed, even playful, atmosphere which deliberately avoided causing anxiety or nervous anticipation in the viewer.” Another discovery was that subjects tended to receive information in fragments and simplified images.  McTaggart observes that “because the information is received by our unconscious mind, we often receive it as we would in a dream state, a memory, or a sudden insight—a flash of an image, a portion of the whole.”  Interestingly, she notes that the study found that if viewers tried to consciously interpret or analyze the information they were receiving, their speculations would distort subsequent information.

In chapter 9, “The Endless Here and Now,” McTaggart examines evidence that the ZPF is not time dependent.  She describes the precognitive remote perception work conducted by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne, who found that remote viewers were somehow able to record and draw impressions of a target traveler’s destination—sometimes hours to several days before the traveler arrived there.  In tests conducted at the University of Nevada, Dean Radin found clinical evidence that people subconsciously scan the future for precognitive information.   He monitored the electrodermal activity, heart rate, and blood pressure of participants as they watched a randomly organized series of computerized photos, some of which were selected for content that might calm, agitate, or arouse the viewers.  He found that, while the viewers registered the greatest response as they viewed disturbing pictures, they also registered physiological responses before they actually saw the photos, particularly when disturbing images were about to be shown.  It seemed that the viewers were subconsciously preparing themselves to deal with the future shock.

Other researchers attempted to test whether they could influence outcomes retroactively. Helmut Schmidt began testing whether the taped output of a REG machine could be affected after the tape was completed, and he found that the results were as significant as if the person had been present when the tape was being recorded. Jahn and Dunne found that subjects could influence their REG machine trials anywhere from three days to two weeks after the machine had run.  Based on his analysis of the evidence, Braud theorized that time-displaced human intention could influence the probability of some event occurring and it might work best on what he called “seed moments”—the first of a chain of events.  McTaggart astutely suggests a possible use of this phenomena: “If you applied these principles to physical or mental health, it could mean that we could use The Field to direct influences ‘back in time’ to alter pivotal moments or initial conditions which later bloom into full-blown problems or disease.”  In my own experience, this is a fundamental precept of shamanic healing:  a healer using altered states of consciousness can look into the past, identify the roots of the problem, and then change the condition at its origin.

In part 3, “Tapping into the Field,” McTaggart explores other possible practical applications of the ZPF research.  In chapter 10, “The Healing Field,” she relates the studies of Elisabeth Targ, a psychiatrist who sought to test the efficacy of alternative medical practices.  Intrigued by clinical studies demonstrating that psychic healers could influence the health of “diseased” plants and reduce the growth of cancerous tumors in laboratory animals, Targ organized several studies to test whether long-distance prayer could influence the level of T-cells in AIDS patients.  She found that, after six months, individuals in the treated group were healthier on every parameter than those in the control group.  One of the interesting observations Targ made was it didn’t seem to matter what method of healing was used, as long as the healer held an intention for a patient to heal.  Moreover, she noticed that most of the healers indicated that they relied on help from the spirit world or religious saints, and that after putting out their intention, they stepped back and allowed the spirit, light, or love to do the healing. 

Based on her review of various remote healing studies, McTaggart suggests that illnesses may be caused by disturbances in an individual’s quantum fluctuations, and that healing might be a matter of influencing those fluctuations to align more coherently with a greater order.  She also cites evidence from studies of heart patients showing that isolation—from one’s community and one’s spirituality—is one of the greatest contributors to disease, and she points out that longevity studies suggest that people who feel they belong to a community and who believe in a higher spiritual being tend to live longest. 

In chapter 11, “Telegram from Gaia,” McTaggart examines the implications of evidence collected by cognitive psychologist Roger Nelson during his REG studies of collective consciousness.  Using Radin’s REG machine, Nelson found that bonded couples had a more profound effect on the machine.  After developing a new, pocket version of the REG machine, he began to test something that he called “field consciousness”—the energy that happens when groups of people come together around activities that engage their minds and emotions.  He wanted to see if the group fields had a cohesive influence on REG patterns.  In fact, he found that the REG patterns moved toward more cohesive and orderly states during moments of peak attention—such as special presentations, climaxes of conferences, and intense moments of spiritual rituals.  In a series of tests conducted during a two-week tour of Egypt with a group of associates, Nelson found that the strongest coherence occurred when the group was engaged in a ritual of chanting inside the main pyramid.  In another series of tests, he organized a network of forty scientists who ran REG machines in different parts of the globe to see if dramatic moments in world events would produce deviations in global energy patterns.  The data showed that anticipated events, such as Mother Teresa’s death, had little effect on the machines.  However, unexpected disasters, such as the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, significantly disturbed the coherence.

In the final chapter, “The Zero Point Age,” McTaggart examines the significance of the last decades of research into the nature of the  ZPF.  She concludes that the research has helped explain the efficacy of energy medicines and that it has essentially proven the existence of a higher, collective consciousness—what some might call God or the Great Mystery.  I particularly appreciate her observation that ZPF research has tended to confirm the intuitive wisdom and healing practices of traditional indigenous cultures.  I also resonate with her conclusion that quantum research shows that we are not isolated beings living desperate lives on a lonely planet in an indifferent universe—that we are all connected through the zero-point field.


Timothy White is founding editor of Shaman’s Drum.

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