Lynne McTaggart - The Power of Eight: Harnessing the Miraculous Energies of a Small Group to Heal Others, Your Life, and the World

The Bond: The Power of Connection

The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World

The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe

What Doctors Dont Tell You: The Truth About the Dangers of Modern Medicine

Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times

The Baby Brokers: The Marketing of White Babies in America

Published and distributed in the United States of America by:

Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

First published and distributed in the United Kingdom by:

Hay House UK Ltd, Astley House, 33 Notting Hill Gate, London W11 3JQ

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Text Lynne McTaggart, 2017

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

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The information given in this book should not be treated as a substitute for professional medical advice; always consult a medical practitioner. Any use of information in this book is at the readers discretion and risk. Neither the author nor the publisher can be held responsible for any loss, claim or damage arising out of the use, or misuse, of the suggestions made, the failure to take medical advice or for any material on third-party websites.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78180-559-6 in print
ISBN 978-1-78180-959-4 in ePub format
ISBN 978-1-78180-958-7 in Kindle format

Interior design by Kyoko Watanabe

For Caitlin and Kyle, and in memory of Stella, who didnt need to see in order to believe

The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock

PART I :
Explaining a Miracle

PART II :
Creating Your Own Power of Eight Circle

For many years, I refused to write this book because I didnt believe for one moment the strange healings that were happening in my workshops; which is to say, I had a hard time handling miracles.

By miracles and healings I am not being metaphoric: I am referring to genuine loaves-and-fishes-type miraculous events a series of extraordinary and untoward situations in which people were instantly healed of all sorts of physical conditions after being assembled into a small group and sent a collective healing thought. I am talking about the kinds of miracles that defy every last belief we hold about the way we are told the world is supposed to work.

The idea of placing people into small groups of about eight started out as a crazy whim of mine during a workshop I ran in 2008, just to see what would happen if group members tried to heal one of their group through their collective thoughts. Id billed them Power of Eight groups, but I may as well have called them Power of Eight Million, so potent did they turn out to be and so much did they rattle everything I thought I knew about the nature of human beings.

As a writer, I am drawn to lifes great mysteries and biggest questions the meaning of consciousness, the extrasensory experience, life after death particularly those anomalies that upset conventional wisdom. I like to ferret out, as the psychologist William James put it, the single white crow necessary to prove that not all crows are black.

But for all my forays into the unconventional, I remain, at heart, a hard-nosed reporter the result of my early background as an investigative journalist and I constantly look to build an edifice of solid evidence. I am not given to arcane references to mysticism or auras, or any sloppy or inchoate uses of the terms quantum or energy. In fact, theres nothing I hate more than unsubstantiated woo-woo, because it gives what I do such a bad name.

I am not an atheist or even an agnostic. A deeply spiritual side to me remains convinced that human beings are more than a pile of chemicals and electrical signalling. But the reason I remain drawn to the Maginot Line separating the material from the immaterial is that I rely upon bell curves and double-blind trials to underpin my faith.

My own, relatively conventional, view about the nature of reality had first taken a knocking after researching my book The Field. I had begun the book as an attempt to understand scientifically why homeopathy and spiritual healing work, but my research soon led me into strange new territory: a revolution in science that challenges many of the most cherished beliefs we hold about our universe and how it operates. The frontier scientists I met during the course of my research all with impeccable credentials attached to prestigious institutions had made astonishing discoveries about the subatomic world that seemed to overthrow the current laws of biochemistry and physics. Theyd found evidence that all of reality may be connected through the Zero Point Field, an underlying quantum energy field and vast network of energy exchange.

A few frontier biologists had conducted research suggesting that the primary system of communication in the body is not chemical reaction, but quantum frequency and subatomic energetic charge. Theyd carried out studies showing that human consciousness is able to access information beyond the conventional bounds of time and space. In countless experiments, theyd shown that our thoughts may not be locked inside our heads but may be trespassers, capable of traversing both other people and things, and even actually influencing them. Each of them had stumbled on a tiny piece of what compounded to a new science, a completely new view of the world.

Writing The Field hijacked me into further pursuit of the nature of this strange new view of reality. I had grown especially curious about the implication of these discoveries: that thoughts are an actual something with the capacity to change physical matter.

This idea continued to nag at me. A number of bestselling books had been published about the law of attraction and the power of intention the idea that you could manifest what you most desired just by thinking about it in a focused way but to all of this I maintained a certain incredulity, overwhelmed by a number of awkward questions. Is this a true power, and exactly how all-purpose is it, I wondered. What can you do with it? Are we talking here about curing cancer or shifting a quantum particle? And to my mind, the most important question of all: what happens when lots of people are thinking the same thought at the same time? Does this magnify the effect?

From the studies Id researched for The Field, it was clear that mind in some way appeared to be inextricably connected to matter and, indeed, seemed capable of altering it. But that fact, which begged many profound questions about the nature of consciousness, had been trivialized by these popular treatments into the idea that you could think yourself into great wealth.