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Where Science and Spirituality Kiss

Moments later, Dean Radin marched back with a computer analysis of the results. He leaned over Teena, showing her a graph with lines that looked like a series of molehills. On a sheet of paper were the emotions that Teena had felt, translated into the language of physiology: squiggly lines that measured blood flow and skin resistance (perspiration). The lines showed that within two seconds of the time that J.D. began sending his “intentions” toward her, she became “aroused” (that is, increased perspiration) and then she would relax (or flush) when he switched off his intentions.

This one test does not offer definitive evidence that one person’s thoughts affect another person’s body. But the Love Study suggests there may be a concrete, measurable, physical connection between bonded couples.19 When Radin and Schlitz analyzed the results of all thirty-six couples in their study, they found that when one person “sent” his compassionate intention to his partner, the partner’s physiology mirrored his within two seconds.20

The correlations were not perfect, but they were powerful. And they did not happen by chance. The odds of getting the results they did by mere chance were 11,000 to 1 for all the bonded couples. And when you looked at the “highly motivated” couples—the ones who were facing cancer, who had something at stake—the odds against chance jumped to 135,000 to 1.

Now, let me be clear. I am not arguing that studies like this one explain reality. These findings could turn out to be a statistical fluke—although there have been some fifty other studies like this one that yielded similar results. I wouldn’t be surprised if in five years, or twenty-five, scientists find wholly materialistic explanations for phenomena such as gut feelings or intuition. But I present the alternative studies here because they offer an explanation—something not pulled out of a magician’s hat but based in quantum physics and tested under rigorous conditions.

“What we’re experiencing here suggests that consciousness or mind or intention is causal—not only in our own bodies, but causal in the external world,” Schlitz said.

When you pray for your child, or root for the Dodgers, or curse at your colleague under your breath, that has a measurable effect, she said. “We can’t yet explain it, but this provides a revolutionary break in thinking about how we’re connected, and how we’re separated. I think we are smack dab in the middle of a paradigm shift.”

As she spoke, a wild thought occurred to me. Perhaps quantum physics offers an explanation for prayer and healing. Maybe Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” is at work, in which prayers move from one person to another through Dean Radin’s Jell-O-like reality, that closely woven fabric of reality in which all things are ultimately entangled. For some, that stuff is God, who does not so much intervene in our lives as provide the medium through which prayers move.

I was curious about how Teena explained the results.

“It’s just the real strong power of energy between people who care for each other.”

Finally, I thought. The missing element. My “God I.O,” the scientist’s God, that intelligence that weaves the universe together, unifies everything in a web of consciousness, the God that resides non-locally, outside of time and space—that God had left me a bit cold. It was flesh and bones without life.What was absent was the pneuma, the breath of love. Even though scientists on the frontiers of science rarely mention that line on God’s résumé, everyone else who believes there is something more than this puts “love” first on the list.

It occurs to me that experiments like the Love Study are both very small and very large. We are talking about tiny variations in a person’s sweat glands; it doesn’t get much more incremental than that. And yet, perhaps Teena’s fluctuating skin resistance swings the door open to a cosmic idea—that she is somehow connected