Mind Power: Can It Move Machines?

We have all heard about people bending spoons and stopping clocks using their power of concentration. But does it really work? Can mind power really influence mechanical things?

I was recently reading The Life We Are Given by George Leonard and Michael Murphy, my review of which appears elsewhere on this blog. While reading the book, I came across something interesting about mind power there. Here is the short passage from the book that speaks about it:

From 1973 through 1975…a researcher named Duane Elgin conducted a remarkable series of exercises at Stanford Research institute, attempting to influence a sensitive, heavily shielded magnetometer by his intentionality alone. The magnetometer measures changes in a magnetic field and records these changes on a moving sheet of paper.

The first few exercises generally followed the same course. Elgin would sit or stand a few feet from the magnetometer, where he could see the recording device, and would focus all the force of his will on the instrument, trying to influence it and thus make the needle move. He could continue this concentrated effort for twenty to thirty minutes, watching the needle tracing an almost straight line – but with no results. Finally, exhausted and exasperated, he would say to himself, “I give up.” At that moment, the needle would start indicating a change in the magnetic field. These changes were by no means insignificant. In some of Elgin’s exercises, the needle went entirely off the scale; to get such results by normal means would take a force estimated to be one thousand times stronger than that of the earth’s magnetic field. Nor did physical distance lessen Elgin’s effectiveness. In one instance, he was able to affect the magnetometer strongly from his home several miles away.

Later, Elgin learned to refine his technique. “I’d spend twenty to thirty minutes doing the best I could to establish a sense of rapport and connectedness with the instrument, and with great will and concentration I would coalesce that sense of connectedness into a field of palpable energy. I’d feel myself coming into a magnetic field and pulsing it to respond. Then, when there would be a moment of total surrender, the response would occur.”[1]

The power of the mind is enormous. The Yoga Vasishtha, a classic text of Vedanta that discusses the nature and powers of the mind in great details, says that as minds we have limitless power at our command. “Thought in the forms of desire, imagination, effort, and will is the most potent force in the world. Mind is endowed with creative power. In its creative activity mind is absolutely free. We all attain to what we aspire after. All that we intensely desire and make efforts for comes to us sooner or later. In fact, our own efforts guided by our aspirations are the warp and woof of our destiny. Our lives are what we make them by our thoughts. The world around us changes in accordance with our own thoughts.”[2]

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[1] The Life We Are Given, by George Leonard and Michael Murphy, Editions India, an imprint of Stone Hill Foundation Publishing, Kochi, Kerala, India.

[2] The Philosophy of Yoga Vasishtha, by Bhikhan Lal Atreya in The Cultural Heritage of India, Vol. III, The Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Kolkata.

A Short Exercise in Miracles

Affirmations are statements we make about the changes we want to see in ourselves. These are statements made in the present tense and are usually used in conjunction with visualizations. An affirmation for an obese person, for instance, could be: I have a slim and fit body. An affirmation for a person who suffers from lack of confidence in public speaking could be: I am confident about speaking in public, and I speak relaxed and with full assurance. Neuro-Linguistic Programming [NLP] makes use of affirmations and visualizations to effect several of the changes it brings about at the body, mind and spiritual level of individuals. Ancient Yoga and modern psychology both believe in the enormous power of affirmations to transform ourselves. Several meditations and meditation traditions make use of the power of affirmations to bring about transformations and events that appear miraculous.

The Life We Are Given by George Leonard and Michael Murphy[i], a book teaching what the authors call Integral Transformative Practice [ITP], speaks about Focused Surrender which Leonard discovered during his work on another book, The Silent Pulse. Focused Surrender is based on the principle that affirmations, visualizations as well as openness to grace work best when they involved “the unlikely marriage of trying and not trying, of zeroing in and letting go.” According to the book, “it appeared that both focused intentionality and the surrender of ego were necessary for experiencing existence at such a fundamental level and creating what often appeared miraculous.”

Given below is an exercise in Focused Surrender from The Life We Are Given . For more such exercises, as well as for several other exercises in self-transformation and personal growth, get a copy of the book.

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Find a carpeted or matted space where you won’t be disturbed. Lie on your back with your feet about as far apart as your shoulders and your arms out a few inches from your sides, palms up. Close your eyes and breathe deeply, letting the incoming breath expand your abdomen as well as your chest. Feel the surface beneath you. Shift slightly, as if you are nestling deeper into this surface.

Now send a beam of awareness through your body, searching out any area of tension. Wherever you find tension, le tit melt away, as if it is sinking into the surface beneath you, then into the earth. After completing this process of relaxation, you will spend a few minutes on a special kind of breathing that will require your concentration – your surrender.

Start by taking a deep breath through your nostrils, with your mouth gently closed, being sure to let your abdomen expand. After you have inhaled fully, part your lips slightly and consciously blow the air out. But do it noiselessly, as if you are blowing a soap bubble away from you. Continue blowing the air out consciously until you have fully exhaled. Then gently close your lips and simply wait, fully relaxed, expecting nothing. This is your moment of surrender. The incoming breath will enter your nostrils of its own accord. You need do nothing at all. If you are in a complete state of surrender, the precise moment of inhalation will come as a slight surprise. After the inhalation has filled you, open your lips slightly and repeat the cycle, consciously exhaling, then closing your lips and waiting for the spontaneous inhalation.

In this process, you are joining the voluntary with the involuntary, the willed with the spontaneous, the conscious with the unconscious. Then in the timeless pause between the willed exhalation and the spontaneous inhalation, you can begin to experience that state of egoless not-doing that is the very essence of creation and grace. Continue with this mode of breathing for a few minutes, then let your breath return to normal.

Now place your left hand, palm down, on your abdomen. With eyes still closed, bring to mind one of your affirmations. Say it aloud several times. Then create a mental image of yourself and your life as it would be, were the affirmation already realized. Make it real in your consciousness in your body. Flesh out that reality with as many feelings as you can. As soon as the realized affirmation becomes vividly present, let your left hand rise a few inches above your abdomen. Le tit float there as if suspended, with no effort on our part. Focus intently on the image, holding it in your mind with all your will. Concentrate!

When you can no longer hold the image in place, simply give up and let your hand fall to your abdomen. Lie there in a state of grateful acceptance of whatever maybe, with a feeling of total surrender, a sense of alignment with the divine spirit or with the universe itself.

Whenever you are ready, repeat the exercise. There’s a good chance the image will become more vivid with repetition. It might well be that your left hand will begin to rise spontaneously, with no conscious effort on your part, accurately signalling the presence of a vivid image in your consciousness.

When you choose to end the exercise, remove your left hand from your abdomen and put it on the floor a few inches out from your left side, palm up. Lie there in a state of acceptance for a while, then deepen your breathing. Move your body around gently with increased awareness of the surface beneath you. Stretch your arms and legs and, if you feel like it, yawn. Then open your eyes and sit up.

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While in many ways different from this, another tool used for achieving personal transformations is the swish technique, which I have used in a few of my training programmes for corporate executives. For several reasons, though, I like Focused Surrender much more than the swish technique, one of them being that Focused Surrender has roots running into the rich soil of spirituality which the swish technique lacks.
As I mentioned at the beginning, the transformations and events brought about through the power of affirmations appear to be miraculous. The Life We Are Given talks about many such experiences.



[i] The Life We Are Given, by George Leonard and Michael Murphy, Editions India, an imprint of Stone Hill Foundation Publishing, Kochi, Kerala, India.