Hidden Messages In Water—Or Hidden Agendas Of Critics?

JGeropoulas

The Living Force
Q: (L) Do thoughts produce gravity?
A: Yes.

A: Real crop circles represent thoughts from 6th density unified thought realm.
-- Sept. 14, 2002 Transcript

Q: (L) And who do we have with us this evening?
A: Nilennioa of Cassiopaea.
Q: (L) I've often wondered when these names come up. They're just such strange things. What is it that they mean?
A: They relate to the specific vibrational frequency of the moment as expressed by the numerical frequency of the combination of vowels and consonants.
Q: (L) What is the numerical frequency of a vowel and consonant?
A: It is a science barely understood by your civilization but was once well known. Words have deeper meaning than you suspect.
-- April 25, 2010 Transcript

A recent forum post ( http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=12588.msg160627#msg160627 ) an article, “Is Emoto For Real?” by Kristopher Setchfield was cited. I had never seen this article before, so I was interested in what Setchfield had to say about Dr. Masaru Emoto’s research on ice crystals (discussed in his 2001 book, "The Hidden Messages In Water”).

Reading Emoto's book stirred both amazement and skepticism, which lead me to discover a variety of studies that supported Emoto’s basic premise: “mind” can affect “matter. But any remaining doubts I harbored subsided after I successfully conducted my own “little experiment” as suggested by Dr. Emoto in his book (more on that later).

Though there may be many reasons “The Hidden Messages In Water” is fascinating, one thing is crystal clear: There are no hidden messages in water. However, sometimes there are hidden agendas to discredit important scientific discoveries.

Mr. Setchfield raises some important issues and makes some reasonable suggestions for Emoto’s future research. (To his list I’d add the suggestion that he consider this more accurate title for his follow-up book “The Amazing Memory of Water”).

But what do we know about the “validity and reliability” of Kristopher Setchfield’s character, motives, journalistic experience, or research skills?

Not a lot, but here are a few introductory details I did find:

He earned a B.A. degree in Health Science from Castleton State College (Natural Science Department) in Vermont

He refers to himself as a “vegetable oil expert, lecturer, and founder” of a company that assists people in converting their cars to run on biofuels instead of petroleum fuels (“What if there was a way that you could reduce the effects of global warming at the same time by using an alternative fuel…”)

He led a workshop at the 2001 “Starwood XXI” festival entitled, “Beyond Circular Breathing” (“So you can breathe, now what? This workshop will present a variety of advanced rhythmic techniques to add to your repertoire. We will not focus any time on how to circular breathe, but rather different ways to work with breath and rhythm. Amazing rhythms can be achieved when you depart from the standard in-out circular breath. All interested persons are invited to attend, even if only to listen.”)

In his article, Mr. Setchfield makes a number of comments (or quotes comments he attributes to Jon Woodhouse in an interview published in the Maui News) to which I'd like to respond.

Many people in our modern age want desperately to believe that we can affect our reality by our thoughts alone—a belief that is bolstered by Emoto’s claims.
It seems to me, there’s a tremendous difference between “creating your own reality” and affecting how ice crystals form in a drop of water in that reality. I can’t create my own reality, but by focusing my mind on certain aspects of reality, I can cause tears to form in my eyes.

As cited further down, there's a good bit of valid research demonstrating that focused thoughts have an observable effects in the physical realm.

James Randi Educational foundation, an organization that offers a “one-million-dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event” (Randi, Challenge) has offered to give Dr. Emoto the prize if he will agree “to perform his tests in a double-blind fashion” (Randi, Water), yet Dr. Emoto has not responded…Emoto’s commercial venture calls to mind ethical concerns regarding his intent and motivation…

After reading about James Randi ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi#Personal_life ) Dr. Emoto may have wisely chosen to avoid starring in one of Randi’s narcissistic circuses, much as Laura wisely avoided becoming “Roads Kill” at that Nexus Conference ( http://www.sott.net/articles/show/207531-Snake-Oil-Humbles-Nexus-Conference ). Perhaps this lack of response to Randi demonstrates that Dr. Emoto is motivated by higher values than greed and fame. Or perhaps Dr. Emoto is aware that Mr. Randi was part of the scheme perpetrated by the science “thought police” to discredit French immunologist, Jacques Beneviste, whose research also validated amazing properties of water. (See discussion below of “The Field”.)

In fact, in the Maui News interview Dr. Emoto specifically stated, “I do not require any blind tests on any samples,” but rather he believes that “the researcher’s aesthetic sense and character is the most important aspect when taking crystal photographs.” Emoto’s belief that ice crystal formation is sensitive to human thought lead him to select technicians who would not affect crystal formation with negative thoughts over technicians who had formal research experience.

While it is possible that he did, in fact, discover that water has an observable sensitivity to external stimuli such as prayer and words, Dr. Emoto’s experimental design and clinical procedures do not prove the claim. A double blind procedure in which a photographer would not know what water sample he or she was photographing would make the claim considerably more credible.

Setchfield's comments are in direct contradiction to what Dr. Emoto said in the 2001 edition of The Hidden Messages in Water (Pages 148-9):

Another important issue is test repeatability. Many times we have seen that crystal formation depends on the observer's consciousness. When water samples are put into Petri dishes-we usualIy make fifty samples the resulting crystals differ, depending on how the water is handled and on the thoughts of the researcher And the condition of the fifty samples of water change moment by moment.

It may be practicalIy impossible to control all of these factors to the point where we can say scientifically that all conditions are equal. However, our approach has been to get as close to these condition as possible, by using the most accurate scientific methods available.

Our efforts include the use of blinds to remove the possibility of change from the researchers' thought. We do this because we don't want the thought that the water being told "Thank you" wiII produce a more beautiful crystal than that being told "You fool" to have an impact on the results. We label the sample dishes with letters of the alphabet, and don't reveal which water is which until after the results have been seen. We hope that this method will remove the effect of the researchers' thoughts as much as possible.

For each of the fifty dishes, we make graphs showing the number of crystals in each dish that are considered beautiful, hexagonal, incomplete, and so on. For each pattern, we establish a coefficient, and give number values to the crystals. This gives us a clear picture of the characteristics of the crystals in each individual sample, and we then can classify the samples into the categories of beautiful, hexagonal, and so forth. Then we choose one crystal to photograph that best represents the characteristics of that particular sample.

Water crystals change depending on the thoughts and even the health of the observers. To account for this, we have several experienced researchers observe the samples. The intention of our research is to use these methods to discover the messages that are contained in this most delicate of messengers.

Setchfield goes on to say:

It is also worth noting that Dr. Emoto’s procedures indicate that his samples are frozen at -25°C, and his ice crystals are formed at -5°C. According to Figure 3, these temperatures should produce mostly column crystals rather than plate crystals, yet not one of Emoto’s published photos show a column crystal. This makes Dr. Emoto’s data suspect (as they appear to conflict with the findings of well-respected researcher) and indicates the possibility that Emoto excluded non-supportive data from his publications

According to Kenneth Lebbrecht, chairman of the department of physics at Caltech and a leading ice crystal researcher…Temperature is the most important factor, and plates tend to form in the 0°C to -3°C and -10°C to -22°C ranges.

On page xxii of his book, Dr. Emoto mentions that he has “a large walk-in refrigerator where the temperature is maintained at –5 C” but goes on to state that when doing water crystal research, they “freeze the [Petri] dishes at –20 C for three hours in a freezer. The results is that the surface tension forms drops of ice in the Petri dishes about one millimenter across…”

Setchfield continues:

questions that would not be present if any scientist had published research supporting his claims…it is this crucial lack of scientific foundation that prevents Dr. Emoto’s work from attracting interest by widely accepted and respected scientists at long-standing research institutions.

There are dozens of examples of impeccable researchers discovering amazing things that would benefit humanity, only to have “official science” ridicule, ostracize, slander, blacklist, impoverish, and occasionally drive insane or to commit “suicide”. In 1970, Fritz-Albert Popp cured cancer! http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=7462.0 and here’s how that was received:

Popp, after all, was used to accolades. Up until that point he'd won nearly every prize you could be awarded in academic life. He'd even picked up the Röntgen prize for his undergraduate diploma work, which consisted of building a small particle accelerator. This prize, named after Popp's hero, Wilhelm Röntgen, is given each year to the top undergraduate in physics at the University of Würzhurg. Popp had studied like a young man possessed. He'd finished his examinations far earlier than the other students. He was awarded his PhD in theoretical physics in record time. The postgraduate work required for German professorships, a five-year proposition for most academics, took Popp just a little more than two years. At the time of his discovery, Popp was already celebrated among his peers for being a whiz kid, not only because of his ability but also because of his dashing, youthful looks….

One of the greatest mysteries of biology is how we and every other living thing take geometric shape…

Other early studies of this phenomenon — now repeated by many scientists — were carried out in the 194os by neuroanatomist Harold S. Burr from Yale University, who studied and measured electrical fields around living things, specifically. salamanders. Burr discovered that salamanders possessed an energy field shaped like an adult salamander, and that this blueprint even existed in an unfertilized egg.

Burr also discovered electrical fields around all sorts of organisms, from molds, to salamanders and frogs, to humans,, Changes in the electrical charges appeared to correlate with growth, sleep, regeneration, light, water, storms, the development of cancer — even the waxing and waning of the moon., For instance, in his experiments with plant seedlings, he discovered electrical fields which resembled the eventual adult plant.

Nevertheless, classical physics, with its assertion of reality as a phenomenon independent of the observer, had left him profoundly suspicious. Popp had read Kant and believed, like the philosopher, that reality was the creation of living systems. The observer must be central to the creation of his world.

Popp was celebrated for his paper. The Deutsche Krebsforschungszentrum (German Cancer Research Center) in Heidelberg invited him to speak before fifteen of the worlds leading cancer specialists during an eight-day conference on all aspects of cancer. The invitation to speak among such exclusive company was an incredible opportunity, and it increased his prestige on his university campus. He arrived in a brand new suit, the most elegant presence at the colloquium, but he was the poorest speaker, struggling with his English to make his voice heard.

In his presentation as well as his paper, Popp's science was unassailable, save for one detail: it assumed that a weak light of 380 nanometres was somehow, being produced in the body. To the cancer researchers, this one detail was some kind of a joke. Don't you think if there were light in the body, they told him, somebody, somewhere would have noticed it by now?

Only a single researcher, a photochemist from the Madame Curie Institute, working on the carcinogenic activity of molecules, was convinced that Popp was right. She invited Popp to work with her in Paris, but would herself die of cancer before he could join her.

The cancer researchers challenged Popp to come up with evidence, and he was ready with a counter challenge. If they would help him build the right equipment, then he would show them where the light was coming from…

Once Popp began publishing his findings, he began to attract the enmity of the scientific community. Many of his fellow German scientists believed that Popp's bright spark had finally gone out. At his university, students wanting to study biophoton emissions began to be censured. By 1980, when Popp's contract as an assistant professor was finished, the university had an excuse to ask him to leave…

He began experimenting with a number of non-toxic substances purported to be successful in treating cancer. In all but one instance, the substances only increased the photons from tumor cells, making it even more deadly to the body. The single success story was mistletoe, which seemed to help the body to 'resocialize' the photon emission of tumor cells hack to normal. In one of numerous cases, Popp came across a woman in her thirties with breast and vaginal cancer. Popp tried mistletoe and other plant extracts on samples of her cancerous tissue and found that one particular mistletoe remedy created coherence in the tissue similar to that of the body. With the agreement of her doctor, the woman began forgoing any treatment other than this mistletoe extract. After a year, all her laboratory tests were virtually hack to normal. A woman who was given up as a terminal cancer case had her proper light restored, just by taking a herb…

Setchfield states:

Emoto’s procedure…does not eliminate numerous possible sources of error…the most important of which are temperature and humidity. While Emoto minimized some possible sources of error by conducting his studies in the same room with the same sample sizes, the same freezer and same microscope each time, other possible sources of error were not addressed…A simple thing such as the photographer’s breath while using the microscope could affect the warming rate of the frozen sample and temperature of crystal formation, thus affecting the structure of the resultant crystal.

Yet Setchfield then cites the following “study”--that has all the above-mentioned flaws, which Dr. Emoto avoided in his studies--as the only published “reproduction” of Dr. Emoto’s work. If this is the only attempt to replicate Dr. Emoto’s studies, then basically, there have been no legitimate attempts, and therefore there has been no refutation of Dr. Emoto’s studies.

The only published reproduction of Emoto’s work on record was conducted by Mr. Damian Nash’s AP psychology class at Durango High School in Colorado.

Setchfield failed to mention that, though Jon Woodhouse cited a similar criticism in the Maui News interview, Woodhouse also refuted it as well:

“There has been…no publications in reputable peer-reviewed scientific journals,” noted John Olmsted, an adjunct instructor in psychology at Portland State University, and member of the Skeptics Society. (In fact, Emoto’s work has been published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Alternative and Complimentary Medicine, Feb. 2004, Vol. 10, No. 1.)

Now back to Setchfield's description of that high-school experiment:

Despite numerous difficulties reproducing Emoto’s procedure and controlling the temperature and sample freezing and melting rates, at least the class employed a blind experimental design to eliminate the possibility of experimenter’s bias when photographing the water samples. As published on the website of the Institute of Noetic Sciences on May 25, 2004, Mr. Nash states that the team “did not find sufficient evidence to refute or accept Emoto’s hypothesis that thought influences water crystal formation.

So, here we have the author citing a high-school psychology class experiment, which had invalidating flaws (i.e. difficulties reproducing Dr. Emoto’s procedures), to support his contention that Dr. Emoto’s controlled study may have had possible flaws.

Not surprisingly, their conclusion was inconclusive—meaning, the study has no meaning regarding the validity of Dr. Emoto’s findings. Yet, Setchfield concludes:

no one has been able to replicate his experiment…it appears that his work has widely been disregarded by traditional scientists as pseudoscience that does not merit further inspection….It is this crucial lack of scientific foundation that prevents Dr. Emoto’s work from attracting interest by widely accepted and respected scientists at long-standing research institutions.

Has no one been able to replicate it because no one has attempted to replicate it? How many scientists have tried to replicate Dr. Emoto’s research? What were their motives, agendas (or FRV http://glossary.cassiopaea.com/glossary.php?id=339&lsel=F )? How many scientists are interested in such research? How many are free to do such research? How many of those would risk offending “official science”? How many “respectable journals” would publish confirming results?

Much can be learned pertaining to these issues by reading Laura’s post http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=7462.0 about “The Field.” Here is the most relevant excerpt:

…Benveniste joined forces with five different laboratories in four countries, France, Israel, Italy and Canada, all of whom were able to replicate his results. The thirteen scientists then jointly published the results of their four-year collaboration in a 1988 edition of the highly prestigious Nature magazine, showing that if solutions of antibodies were diluted repeatedly until they no longer contained a single molecule of the antibody, they still produced a response from immune cells., The authors concluded that none of the molecules they'd started with were present in certain dilutions and that:
Quote
specific information must have been transmitted during the dilution/shaking process. Water could act as a template for the molecule, for example, by an infinite hydrogen-bonded network, or electric and magnetic fields . . . The precise nature of this phenomenon remains unexplained.

To the popular press, which pounced on the published paper, Benveniste had discovered `the memory of water', and his studies were widely regarded as making a valid case for homeopathy. Benveniste himself realized that his results had repercussions far beyond any theory of alternative medicine. If water were able to imprint and store information from molecules, this would have an impact on our understanding of molecules and how they `talk' to one another in our bodies, as molecules in human cells, of course, are surrounded by water. In any living cell, there are ten thousand molecules of water for each molecule of protein.

Nature also undoubtedly understood the possible repercussions of this finding on the accepted laws of biochemistry. The editor, John Maddox, had consented to publish the article, but he did so after taking an unprecedented step — placing an editorial addendum at the bottom of the article:

“Editorial reservation

Readers of this article may share the incredulity of the many referees who have commented on several versions of it during the past several months. The essence of the result is that an aqueous solution of an antibody retains its ability to evoke a biological response even when diluted to such an extent that there is a negligible chance of their being a single molecule in any sample. There is no physical basis for such an activity. With the kind collaboration of Professor Benveniste, Nature has therefore arranged for independent investigators to observe repetitions of the experiments. A report of this investigation will appear shortly.”

Benveniste [agreed] to their request to reproduce his results at his laboratory.

Four days after publication, Maddox himself arrived with what Benveniste described as a scientific 'fraud squad', composed of Walter Stewart, a well-known quackbuster, and James Randi, a professional magician who tended to he called in to expose scientific work that had actually been arrived at by sleight of hand. Were a magician, a journalist and a quackbuster the best possible team to assess the subtle changes in biological experimentation, wondered Benveniste. Under their watchful eye, Elisabeth Davenas performed four experiments, one blinded, all of which, Benveniste said, were successful.

Nevertheless, Maddox and his team disputed the findings and decided to change the experimental protocol and tighten the coding procedures, even, in a melodramatic gesture, taping the code to the ceiling. Stewart insisted on carrying out some of the experiments himself and changed some of their design even though, Benveniste claimed, he was untrained in these particular experiments.

Under their new protocol, and amid a charged atmosphere implying that [Benveniste’s team was] hiding something, three more tests were done and shown not to work. At this point, Maddox and his team had their results and promptly left, first asking for photocopies of two of Benveniste's papers.

Soon after their five-day visit, Nature published a report entitled 'High dilution experiments a delusion'. It claimed that Benveniste's lab had not observed good scientific protocol. It discounted supporting data from other labs. Maddox expressed surprise that the studies didn't work all the time, when this is standard in biological studies — one reason Benveniste had conducted more than 500 trials before publishing. The Maddox judgment also failed to note that the staining test is highly sensitive and can be tipped with the slightest change in experimental condition,

In Japan, a physicist called Kunio Yasuo of the Research Institute for Information and Science, Notre Dame Seishin University in Okayama, also found that water molecules have some role to play in organizing discordant energy into coherent photons — a process called 'superradiance'.

This suggests that water, as the natural medium of all cells, acts as the essential conductor of a molecule's signature frequency in all biological processes and that water molecules organize themselves to form a pattern on which can he imprinted wave information. If Benveniste is right, water not only sends the signal but also amplifies it.

The most important aspect of scientific innovation is not necessarily the original discovery, but the people who copy the work. It is only the replication of initial data that legitimizes your research and convinces the orthodox scientific community that you might be onto something. Despite the virtually universal derision of Beneviste's results by the Establishment, reputable research slowly began to appear elsewhere. In 1992, LASER (the Federation of ;American Societies for Experimental Biology) held a symposium, organized by the International Society for Bioelectricity, examining the interactions of electromagnetic fields with biological systems.- Numerous other scientists have replicated high-dilution experiments, and several others have endorsed and successfully repeated experiments using digitized information for molecular communication. Benveniste's latest studies were replicated eighteen times in an independent lab in Lyon, France, and in three other independent centres.

Several years after the memory of water Nature episode, scientific teams still tried to prove Benveniste wrong. Professor Vladelene Ennis of Queen's University in Belfast joined a large pan-European research team, with hopes of showing, once and for all, that homeopathy and water memory were utter nonsense. A consortium of four independent laboratories in Italy, France, Belgium and Holland, led by Professor M. Roberfroid of the Catholic University of Louvain, in Brussels, carried out a variation of Benveniste's original experiment with basophil degranulation. The experiment was impeccable. None of the researchers knew which was the homeopathic solution and which pure water. All the solutions had even been prepared by labs which had nothing further to do with the trial. Results were also coded and decoded and tabulated by an independent researcher also unconnected with the study.

In the end, three of four labs got statistically significant results with the homeopathic preparations. Professor Ennis still didn't believe these results and put them down to human error. To eliminate the possible vagaries of humans, she applied an automated counting protocol to the figures she had. Nevertheless, even the automated results showed the same. The high dilutions of the active ingredient worked, whether the active ingredient was actually present or water so dilute that none of the original substance remained. Ennis was forced to concede: 'The results compel me to suspend my disbelief and to start searching for rational explanations for our findings.'"

This represented the last straw to Benveniste. If Ennis's results were negative, they would have been published in Nature, thereby forever consigning his work to the trash heap. Because their results agreed with his, they were published in a relatively obscure journal, a few years after the event, a guarantee that no one would really notice.

In another article, the author cites this research that supports Dr. Emoto’s findings. ( http://www.informiti.net/articledetail.php?artid=56945&catid=271 )

Scientific Research Demonstrates Emoto is Correct!”

…a body of research…that clearly supports Mr. Emoto was conducted in the 1960's by biologist Dr. Bernard Grad of McGill University in Montreal.

Dr. Grad wanted to see if people can actually transmit healing energy to others. Rather than using person to person contact, he decided to use plants. This was a control method to eliminate the placebo effect.

In the first part of his study, he decided to make plants ill by soaking their seeds in salty water which retards growth. He had two experimental conditions. In the first, the control, he just had a container of salt water. In the second, he had a person known for psychic healing lay hands on the salt water container. Afterwards, the seeds were divided into two groups and soaked in the plain salt water or the treated salt water.

The results were unexpected. The seeds soaked in the water treated by intense thought grew taller than the untreated batch. It was a tightly controlled experiment and the results demonstrated that whatever the healer did to the water, was reflected in the improved health of the plants!

What Happens with Negative Thoughts?

In his first study, Dr. Grad demonstrated the effects of positive thoughts on water which had a positive effect on the plants that used it. He hypothesized that if the effect in the first study was accurate, that the opposite would occur with negative thoughts.

Dr. Grad decided that the best source of negative thoughts was disturbed psychiatric patients. One patient in his experimental group was diagnosed with psychotic depression and was noticeable more depressed than the other patients. He had each patient hold containers of plain water and marked them to know which patient held which container. He also used untreated water as a control. When Dr. Grad used the water to sprout seeds, all the water samples held by the psychiatric patients produced poor growth but the water from the extremely depressed person suppressed growth!

Again, these were plants and not subject to the placebo effect. They were being affected by the water that had been simply held by psychiatric patients. In other words, the patients were doing nothing more than being themselves and the water was affected!

Test Equipment Confirms Change in Water

Dr. Grad had much more scientific resources available to him than Masaru Emoto. Using infrared spectroscopy, he discovered that the water treated by the healer had minor shifts in its molecular structure and decreased hydrogen bonding between the molecules. This is the same thing observed when water has been exposed to magnetic fields. Thought DID affect the water!

And below are excerpts from this review of 61 of studies conducted by researchers at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) center at the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Princeton University (“Correlations of Random Binary Sequences with Pre-Stated Operator Intention: A Review of a 12-Year Program” by R. G. Jahn, B. J. Dunne, R. D. Nelson, Y. H. Dobyns, and G. J. Bradish http://www.princeton.edu/%7Epear/human_machine.html ).

Interestingly, it was announced recently that this research project would be terminated “as planned” because they had achieved their original goals.

(Note, that early studies of the mind’s effect on physical objects would monitor changes in the number patterns derived from rolls of dice. Now, researchers use a computer programmed to pick random numbers. Because these “Random Event Generators” are used in field experiments, they’re referred to as “Field-REG”s. In “mind over matter” experiments, a positive result is when these computers begin selecting more patterned numbers in response to manipulation of experimental variables.)

Based on formal analysis of 18 exploratory applications…a testable general hypothesis for Field-REG experiments has been postulated, namely that data taken in environments fostering relatively intense or profound subjective resonance will show larger deviations of the mean relative to chance expectation than those generated in more pragmatic assemblies. The 61 subsequent [experiments] reported here comprise 21 hypothesis-based formal replications, along with 40 further explorations designed to learn more about the circumstances that favor anomalous deviations. The results of the formal replications strongly confirm the general hypothesis, yielding a composite probability against chance for the resonant subset of 2.2 x 10-6 compared to 0.91 for the mundane subset. The exploratory work suggests other venues in which anomalous effects of group consciousness can be expected, and also identifies a number of situations that do not appear to be conducive to such responses.

Earlier experimental evidence for direct influence of individual intention [i.e. thought] on…physical random events has been documented in numerous research articles and meta-analyses (Radin & Nelson, 1989; Jahn et al., 1997; Dobyns
& Nelson, 1997; Jahn, Dunne, and Nelson, 1987; Nelson et al., 1991). While the effects in these experiments are statistically robust, they resist explanation via canonical scientific models, and have lead us to propose broader interpretations that explicitly acknowledge the involvement of subjective aspects of consciousness in objective physical processes (Jahn & Dunne, 1997).

More than 50 publications are available on the PEAR website, and Jahn and Dunne's textbook, Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World (Harcourt, 1987) has been in print for nearly 20 years. As part of their extensive archiving efforts, Jahn and Dunne have recently prepared a 150-page anthology of those PEAR publications pertinent to…alternative medicine [which treats bodies that are 70% water, which Emoto and others have demonstrated is quite responsive to human consciousness]

The Field-REG appears to respond to changes in a “consciousness field” of the sort that hasbeen proposed in a variety of different contexts by scholars from several disciplines (Basham, 1959; Durkheim, 1961; James, 1977; Sheldrake, 1981) . Theconcept of such a consciousness field is also consistent with the informal testimony of several of our laboratory operators, who speak of achieving a state of “resonance” with the device during successful operation.

Also, the study of “cymatics” seems relevant http://www.world-mysteries.com/sci_cymatics.htm . And even the Pleiadeans weigh in on the subject.

Because sexuality was an opportunity for human beings to regain their memory… to find an avenue to the spiritual realm that you are sealed off from, the churches came about and promoted sexuality for procreation only…women were told that they had no control over the birth process…

…You must realize that only you decide whether you are going to birth a child or not. This is not such a complicated thing as you have been told. Decision and intention are what bring experience to your being. If woman had had this ability for the last several thousand years, and if she had been able to explore herself without fear of having a child, perhaps men and women would have discovered that they were much freer than they been told they were.

-- Barbara Marciniak’s “Bringers Of The Dawn“ (page 214)

Keep this passage in mind while reading about this fertility research—as well as the vociferous attempts to discredit it.
Larry Dossey, M.D. is the former chief of staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital and a diplomat for the American Board of Internal Medicine, He has also been called America’s foremost expert on the healing effect of “prayer” [broadly construed and non-sectarian] and has written nine books on the topic, drawing from data of 88 separate studies.

In one study, people concentrating on harming fungi could inhibit growth in 151 out of 194 fungus samples. Another well-controlled experiment, conducted in 1998 by Dr. Elisabeth Targ at the California Pacific Medical Center, showed positive results for the effects of prayer…on patients suffering from advanced AIDS. Compared to the control group – those not receiving prayer – the patients who were being prayed for were overall less sick and recovered faster, in greater multitudes.

Dossey cites a recent study in which subjects visiting a fertility clinic in Seoul, South Korea were divided into two groups. One group was prayed for; the other was not. The study, performed by Columbia Medical School in New York, was a triple-blind study (i.e. both the doctors and patients in Seoul did not know that a study was going on) in order to prevent a placebo effect in the test subjects and thereby avoid criticism for lack of control over experimental variables.

The data revealed that the prayed-for group had twice the success rate after in vitro fertilization as the group not prayed for. Despite those robust results, here’s the response from “Official Science”—the very skeptics of “mind over matter” or “the power of prayer”:

clients were prayed for without informed consent This is unethical, potentially dangerous, and possibly illegal… violates both the Nuremberg Code and the Helsinki Declaration.

This is an excellent example of how the “thought police” of science try to deprive us of knowledge about our potential power—especially for controlling fertility (given supposed concerns about overpopulation, as featured in this provocative cover photo http://motherjones.com/toc/2010/05 )

So who wrote this hysterical comment about prayer violating the Nuremberg Code?! And why? The author is obstetrician and gynecologist, Bruce L. Flamm, M.D. Here’s another of his revealing rants:

In the United States each IVF treatment cycle costs an average of $9,000, and several cycles are often required to achieve a viable pregnancy. For patients who require IVF, the cost of each live birth has been estimated at over more than $50,000. Since IVF is costly for health insurance companies…it would be logical for these organizations to advocate the introduction of prayer into infertility programs. The claimed doubling of IVF success rates could save insurance companies an average of $25,000 per patient. With millions of dollars at stake and with these compelling study results as evidence, insurance companies could insist that prayer be tried first.
That is, “tried first” (presumably, with successful results) which would preclude fertility clients from bowing at the feet of “modern medicine”. So despite pages of Dr. Framm’s paramoralisms about patient care, it seems that he actually only cares about how much his income will shrink if patients learn how to use their thoughts to control fertility!

In his excellent book, “Healing Words,” Dr. Dossey cites the following experiment to illustrate that standards for scientific validity (e.g. double-blind design) must be reconceptualized for research involving human consciousness, such as that done by Dr. Emoto.

“a group of mice were injected with either “a strain of malaria organisms” or “a sterile saline”. The handlers of the mice were told that the injection contained either a "high dose” or "low dose" of microorganisms. They also were informed that a healer would try to heal some of the rats but not others. In fact the handlers were deceived: there was no high or low dose (the malaria injections identical); and there no healer was employed.

In one phase of the experiment, results tended in the direction of the expectations of the handlers: the rats believed to have had high-dose injections did worse, and those believed to have had the low-dose injections did better. In addition, mice designated for the healer did better than those not designated for the healer…There should have been differences between the high-dose and low-dose groups, since there was no difference in the strength of the injections; and there should have been no difference between the healed and nonhealed groups, since there was no healer.

This experiment raises profound questions about whether; double-blind experimental design used in medical research is as fool-proof as believed. In double-blind situations, neither the experimenter, nor the subjects know who is and is not receiving the treatment studied, such as a new drug. Since the subjects don't know if they are receiving the drug or a placebo, they won't be as susceptible to the effects of suggestion; and since the experimenters are unaware which subjects received the drug and which did not, they will be less prone to bias when assessing any effects they observe in the subjects. We assume that these precautions eliminate the effects of expectation and suggestion in both the researchers and subjects. In the above study with malarial mice, however, the double-blind precautions were not sufficient: the outcome of the experiment mirrored the beliefs and expectations of the lab workers.

Similar findings have been seen in double-blind studies involving humans…It appears that double-blind studies can sometimes be steered in directions that correspond to the thoughts and attitudes of the experimenters. This might shed light on why skeptical experimenters appear unable to replicate the findings of believers, and why "true believers" seem more able to produce positive results. The validity of decades of experimental findings in medical research would need to be reevaluated if it is proved that the mind can "shove the data around”.

Mr. Setchfield questions Dr. Emoto’s character and implies he’s a charlatan out to make a buck. But, I’ve read Emoto’s book several times, and I just don’t detect a hint psychopathic character within those pages. (FWIW, I've practiced as a licensed psychologist for 21 years and am pretty well-versed with fellow psychologist, Andrew Lobaczewski's work.) Instead, his writing reflects what seems to be genuine compassion and concern for humanity. At worst, perhaps Emoto is simply naïve and has entrusted marketing to psychopaths who are exploiting his discovery.

Here are a couple of “professional references” for Dr. Emoto’s intriguing research:

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake is best-known for his “morphic resonance” theory He has had his share of critics, despite having the training and credentials that Setchfield says Dr. Emoto lacks (e.g. scholarship to study Natural Sciences at Cambridge, specialized in biochemistry, graduated with double-first-class honours, won the University Botany Prize, awarded a Frank Knox fellowship to study philosophy and history at Harvard University (around when Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published), Ph.D. at Cambridge in biochemistry, Fellow at Clare College at Cambridge, director of studies in biochemistry and cell biology, Research Fellow of the Royal Society).

The Hidden Messages in Water (pages 95-7) includes these comments by Dr. Sheldrake regarding Emoto’s work

I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Sheldrake during a lecture tour of Europe. A friend who attended the seminar happened to know Sheldrake's wife, and so I found myself invited to their home in London. I was pleased to learn that he already knew about my research into water crystals; he said, "At least once every week I get a letter from someone telling me about you:' I had many questions for Dr. Sheldrake, but he was also extremely interested in my work,

He also shared the following with me:

I have conducted research into living organisms and their behavior but not water; and so I'm not that familiar with water. However, it's likely that in the future there will be connections between my research and your research into water crystals.

The area that I'm most interested in is the effect that observation has on the observed. There are people who know when someone is looking at them from behind. I want to do research to try and express this in a statistical way. There's a risk that the documentation [for my research] will be subjective, so I'm wondering if we can't use water in the experiment instead [to eliminate subjectivity].

During an interview, Dr. Cheng Luojia, a Chinese physicist, had this to say about Dr. Emoto’s work http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/salud/esp_salud16b.htm

Zhengjian Reporter: In your opinion, what is the most unique thing about the water crystal experiments carried out by Mr. Emoto?

Dr. Cheng Luojia: The experiment is pretty simple. It demonstrates the differing ways of water crystallization in different situations. It is rare to have an experiment that is this concise, intuitive, and easy to understand, and that in itself is a huge accomplishment. This experiment deals with an extremely immense and important subject, namely how people’s minds influence matter. Not too many experiments have been done in this area. The relationship between matter and mind is a topic that has been debated for a long time. Being able to explore the relationship between the two using such a simple experiment is very meaningful.

In addition, the original photographs of the experiments are enlarged 200 to 500 times. The observations have actually reached microscopic levels, that is, it is observing microscopic planes instead of points. This is rarely seen in scientific circles. I believe observation of the whole microscopic plane will bring forth a brand new world to us.

I think, both in terms of its subject and its research methodology, this experiment is a new beginning in science.

Gurdjieff speaks of “refined substances” Perhaps our “scientific method” needs to be refined to better facilitate our explorations of meta physics.

Speaking of explorations of meta physics, here’s that “little experiment” Dr. Emoto suggests:

If you want to see how much of an impact your consciousness can have on the world, I suggest that you conduct a little experiment by playing a game we’ll call "cloud erasing.” I want you to try to erase clouds using the power of your thoughts.

On a partially clear day, look up in the sky and target just one cloud, maybe one not too large. Your thoughts are very important in playing this game, and so it's important to believe that the cloud will disappear, but you shouldn't try too hard. Focusing too hard will actually have the effect of preventing your energy from being sent out.

When you are ready, imagine an invisible beam of energy being sent from your consciousness towards the cloud, breaking it into pieces. See in your mind how the laser-beam targets the entire cloud and not just one part.

Then say, in the past tense, "The cloud has disappeared"; at the same time, say to the energy (again in the past tense), "Thank you for doing that. If you follow these steps, I'm sure that the cloud will start to thin out and disappear in a matter of minutes.

As this shows, human consciousness can have an enormous impact on the world around us. Clouds consist of water in the gaseous state, and so it responds especially quickly to our will.

I’ve conducted that experiment 4 times and it has worked every time.

Initially, a friend had tried it and told me it worked. I didn’t disbelieve him, but never got around to doing it. I realized that my reluctance might indicate that I feared disproving the amazing phenomenon proposed by Dr. Emoto’s work. One day, I “just decided” I had to get out side, so I forced myself to grab something to eat and head to the park. It was a beautiful day and I “just decided” to lay back in the grass and take a little nap in the sun. Well, when I did, I looked up at the sky full of puffy clouds and realized it was a perfect opportunity to do the “cloud erasing” experiment. Time to “put up or shut up” I told myself.
The conditions couldn’t have been more perfect. There were 3 large “dollar-bill sized” clouds. In the middle of them was a single “quarter-sized” cloud. All distinct, all at the same altitude, all not moving. I began as instructed, but as the bright sunlight made me close my eyes, I realized I was staring at the cloud vs. thinking about the cloud. So I closed my eyes and began to think as Emoto suggested. As a result, I peeked about once per minute. When I peeked the 3rd time, something was changing, but only in the center cloud. By the 4th minute, it was indisputable that the cloud was dissipating. It was completely gone in 5 minutes. I sat there for another 30 minutes pondering what had happened. The amazement only grew stronger as I watched the surrounding 3 “dollar-bill sized” clouds remain fixed exactly as they’d been originally. It was a very transcendent, exhilarating moment of joy.

A few months I told my daughter (who’s wary of metaphysical matters) about my experiences. A few weeks later, she confided in me that she’d tried “that thing with the clouds” but nothing happened. She added, “but I was distracted with Oliver” (my 3-year-old grand-son).

For a long time, I wouldn’t attempt to replicate the experiment. But as before, I cajoled myself and made a second attempt. This time, deciding it wasn’t magic, but metaphysics, I felt free to take a more scientific approach. Instead of lying I the park at noon, I was sitting in a car in a busy parking lot at 4 pm. Instead of a well-defined cloud, I picked a larger, less defined cloud. I noted the time and began. I realized I felt insincere saying “thank you” to a cloud, so I approximated by thanking God for the beauty of creation. The cloud disappeared within 5 minutes. I concluded that genuine thankfulness (which brings with it a certain set of other frequencies, e.g. humility) establishes a powerful mental frequency.

The 3rd experiment was back in the same large city park as the first time. It occurred the day after I’d read Mr. Setchfield’s critique of Dr. Emoto’s book. Right after I began, I noticed a jet disbursing chemtrails (something that has become a weekly event over my city the past several months). This was the first time I’d witnessed the “first brush stroke” of 2 jets laying out a grid of chemtrails. It was like watching a spider silently begin it’s web. One jet flew directly above me leaving a bold chemtrail line right through the cloud I was “erasing”! Within a minute, a second jet flew across that line to create the typical “X”—directly over me! ( http://i878.photobucket.com/albums/ab344/jimmygeropoulas/Chemtrailsoverthepark5-13-10a-1.jpg )

(Some have proposed this routine “X”, depicted in numerous photos online ( _http://educate-yourself.org/ct/20feb9pic1.jpg and http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/Chemtrails.html ) is a marker for satellite photo mapping of their “heavenly” HAARP work). It’s kind of crazy to say, but I felt as if I had been challenged, so I proceeded, thinking this was one hell of a variable to introduce into my “little experiment”! The cloud disappeared despite the distraction.

The 4th experiment evolved as I watched that expanding “X” drift across the sky. I quickly picked another little cloud that was drifting out my line of sight due to a tree. I wanted to test if I could make it disappear even if it was not visable. And instead of standard “thanking” thoughts, I recited a customized version of the POTS to the cloud (“holy awareness of all creation…in the clouds…”). After a few minutes, I moved away from the tree to see what had happened, just in time to see the last remnants of that cloud.

It was hardly just another “walk in the park” with that kind of communion with the “Divine Cosmic Mind”!

So to answer Mr. Setchfield’s question,
IMHO Emoto is for real.


Bows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I've looked at clouds that way.

Oh but now old friends are acting strange
They shake their heads, they say I've changed
Well something's lost but something's gained
In living every day.

I've looked at life from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
it's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all.

(selected verses from “Both Sides Now” by Joni Mitchell)

*edit by mod* deactivated link
 
Nicely put together, JGeropoulas.

Perhaps Dr. Emoto's work suffers from the same phenomena as Rupert Sheldrake's 'morphogenesis' and James Lovelock's Gaia concept. Essentially, there seems to be two general classes of scientists, one of which sees the mysterious co-relations of phenomena observed by others, but can not accept anything unless it can be made to fit neatly into already established 'categories'.

The automatic, catch-all rejection seems to be:

JGeropoulas said:
There is no physical basis for such an activity.


If I recall correctly, James Lovelock once commented that no one would listen to the Gaia theory until he had taken it far enough to demonstrate specific ecological feedback mechanisms; so, I suppose mechanical thinking people get really fidgety when they're not safely tucked away inside their 'machine'. :)
 
Bud said:
Perhaps Dr. Emoto's work suffers from the same phenomena as Rupert Sheldrake's 'morphogenesis' and James Lovelock's Gaia concept. Essentially, there seems to be two general classes of scientists, one of which sees the mysterious co-relations of phenomena observed by others, but can not accept anything unless it can be made to fit neatly into already established 'categories'.

Or as Hira Ratan Manek summed it up:
"Those who believe, they do it, and those who do not believe--to them, any amount of explanation won’t work."

(Hira Ratan Manek was born in 1937 in India, where he earned a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Kerala. After graduating, he joined his family’s spice trade business before retiring from that in 1992 to pursue a life-long interest in sun gazing. He says that sun gazing activates the full potential of your brain, bringing forth “infinite inherent powers” that have remained dormant for millennia. As a result of sun gazing, he has been living on sun energy and water alone since June 18, 1995, with only occasional tea, coffee and buttermilk for “hospitality and social purposes.” He has also undergone three strict long-term fastings, during which he was under the control and observation of various scientific and medical teams.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/01/08/feasting-on-sunshine.aspx )
 
Back
Top Bottom