A Paradigm-Busting Discovery about the Power of Love, and a Possible Test for Love at First Sight—with Revelations for Leaders and Lovers Alike
Love itself is dangerous wisdom. How does deepening our understanding (and even our wonderstanding) of love go together with a paradigm shift in science and society? How do those things in turn connect with philosophy? And could science ever find a way to detect the possibility of love at first sight?
In a recent dialogue with the rigorous and scientifically daring researcher, Dean Radin, we spoke about one of his coolest experiments, on the power of love. Because of his fascinating, paradigm-challenging, and rather mind-blowing experiments in quantum mechanics, I only half-jokingly suggest that Radin deserves serious consideration for a Nobel Prize. But we’ll save the quantum stuff for another time (or, you can listen to the interview).
Radin boldly goes where few scientists will even consider going—we could say, where angels fear to tread—into “the great field” of new discoveries, which the philosopher/psychologist William James wrote about. In an essay/speech called, “What Psychical Research Has Accomplished,” James wrote the following:
“The great field for new discoveries,” said a scientific friend to me the other day, “is always the unclassified residuum.”
He means the anomalous data, the stuff we can’t explain. He went on . . . and we need to consider just a bit more, to give this experiment on love its due, and to give love its due:
Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to . . . . Phenomena unclassifiable within the system are therefore paradoxical absurdities, and must be held untrue. When, moreover, as so often happens, the reports of them are vague and indirect; when they come as mere marvels and oddities rather than as things of serious moment,—one neglects or denies them with the best of scientific consciences. Only the born geniuses let themselves be worried and fascinated by these outstanding exceptions, and get no peace till they are brought within the fold. [The great geniuses] are always getting confounded and troubled by insignificant things. Anyone will renovate [their] science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena. And when the science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.
It’s nice to imagine a renewal of science. Perhaps it’s even nicer thinking that renewal might get some of its vitalizing energy from love.
Love involves many puzzles, paradoxes, and mysteries. It reveals so much about human ignorance and human excellence, about the sacred and the profane.
The case Radin investigated had to do with love’s possible role in healing, and in a connectedness. We’re talking about phenomena that , as James put it, “must be held untrue,” phenomena the current overarching paradigm of the science of the dominant culture must push to the margins, into the unclassified residuum. James should have just called it like it is: We do classify this stuff, but we call it “coincidence,” “noise,” or just plain bunk.
Radin investigated the literature on what used to be called intercessory prayer. These phenomena now get referred to as Distant Healing Intention (DHI), which is just like it sounds: Someone tries to send some sort of healing “intention” from a distance (i.e., totally removed from the person meant to receive it, to eliminate obvious confounds).
Some of the challenges with trying to heal someone at a distance relate to very old challenges in the great field of new discoveries related to the mind: People find more success with greater connection to the task. DHI might ask someone to send healing intention to someone they don’t know, which might have left the sender feeling less connected, interested, and motivated.
Radin and his team decided to overcome this obstacle by finding pairs of people with strong connections: friends, long-term partners, married couples, and mother-child pairs. But these pairs shared an additional factor that provided enhanced motivation: One person of each pair had cancer.
Then the team took things further: They added a training element. Specifically, they had participants enter a mind/heart training practice called tonglen. “Tonglen” is a Tibetan word. The “tong” part means, “sending out,” and the “len” part means “receiving.
Tonglen belongs to a holistic ecology of practice, a powerful and empowering framework for training mind, heart, body, and world. This matrix of training helps us turn the everyday moments of life into opportunities for transformative and healing insight. It even allows us to work with intensely challenging situations, experiences, and emotions in such a way that their very intensity becomes an enhanced fuel for liberation.
Because of its efficacy, I never taught a university course without teaching this and related practices to help students learn more effectively, reduce stress and burnout, and in general improve their capacity for knowing and being, living and loving. Today, every private client I work with long-term will learn not only the tonglen practice, but also a larger ecology of teachings that make it more empowering.
In Radin’s experiment, the participants without cancer received training in tonglen, and then practiced tonglen 30 minutes every day for 3 months. But one of the groups participated in the experimental protocol before that training, while the other group participated after that training. A final control group consisted of people with no personal connection and no training, but who expressed some interest or curiosity about DHI.
That gave Radin and his team three groups: Interest, Motivated, Motivated and Trained.
Here’s the experimental protocol in broad strokes:
Sender and receiver were completely isolated from one another in physically separated rooms. The receiver would have no idea when the sender might begin or end the process of sending them healing intentions from a distance. Those times were generated randomly by a computer.
Picture someone you love. Imagine they have cancer, and you have been trained to send them healing intentions at a distance. You’re about to find out if it works.
Imagine they are in a room totally cut off from you. You’re looking at a monitor. A computer randomly turns on the monitor, signaling you to begin. You can see your loved one, but they cannot see you, and they have no idea if your monitor is on or not. You send the healing intentions as you were trained to do so until the monitor goes off. The receiver just relaxes in their isolated room while their skin conductance is measured, which reliably reflects psychological or physiological arousal.
The assumptions of dominant culture science, the philosophical biases of dominant culture scientists, would lead us to assume nothing should happen. Indeed, we should be inclined to say that it would be impossible to establish empirical support for a distant healing intention like this.
But that’s a good example of “knowledge” as endarkenment rather than enlightenment, because Radin found it, he found empirical evidence of a nonlocal connection. In fact, he found an effect even in the untrained, relatively “unmotivated” control group. The group who were motivated but not trained got an even stronger effect. And the strongest effect appeared in the group who were both motivated and trained.
Key message: This experiment demonstrates, among other things, why training is central to the philosophical life, and that proper philosophical training produces superior results. This is why philosophy in the ancient world was associated with excellence—arete in ancient Greek. Personified as a goddess, Arete and her sister Homonoia (oneness of mind, or harmony of hearts) manifested the practice of justice, an aspect of love we usually associate with its social or cultural dimension (a quality necessary in a truly successful romantic relationship, but obviously not sufficient all by itself).
And the experiment reminds us that Plato and Socrates taught us that the path to wisdom is love—that, in fact, wisdom, love, and beauty arise totally interwoven. If we approach life the right way, then becoming more skillful, graceful, and creative in our capacity to love increases our level of wisdom, and cultivating more wisdom increases the skill, creativity, and grace in our ability to love and be loved in return.
But that’s not the end of the story. In an interview with Radin, he related something to me that wasn’t in the study, the sort of marvel or oddity William James referred to. We should first make clear that the official data of the experiment already challenges the paradigms of dominant culture science in the most rigorous manner. However, the story Radin related adds icing to our magical cake.
The control group happened to be comprised of people who had their medical degree, and who would soon become doctors. They had keen minds, asked excellent questions about the study, and understood the underlying physiology thoroughly. They paired up with people they had known for less than a day, as part of the study.
During the debriefing, Radin asked everyone to describe their experiences. Many of the receivers experienced very little on a conscious level. While their “body” or “physiology” registered something happening, this often failed to reach conscious awareness.
But Radin noticed that a few of the participants from the control group seemed strangely reticent to discuss their experience. Eventually, he got the full story.
For a few of those participants, the receiver experienced “overwhelming waves of love,” arriving quite unexpectedly. It felt like “something big happening,” and the sender experienced something significant as well.
These participants (four in total) had agreed to partner together for the experiment, but they were otherwise total strangers. Yet in some of the pairs, both participants felt something significant happening, and that something appeared in the official data.
Both of those couples ended up getting married, perhaps in part because they felt such a sense of wonder in relation to what we could refer to as a non-local connection, or a soul resonance. Philosophy begins in wonder, and presents us a path of love. So it seems appropriate that these love stories began in wonder—and perhaps will lead to the germination of life wisdom.
Radin speculated, a little tongue in cheek, that perhaps this would make for a helpful dating service. If you feel attracted to someone, we could run this experiment, and if the effect appears, then maybe you found a soul mate. The wisdom traditions might hasten to add that, if you both commit to holistic training of mind and heart, that love might take on even richer forms, evolving as a process of mutual nourishment, mutual illumination, and mutual liberation.
It seems profoundly important to sit with the fact that these findings appear as anomalous data in the current paradigms of dominant culture science. We should perhaps see this as something of an indictment of those paradigms, an indictment of our limited and limiting views about the nature of reality, including the nature of love as well as the nature of Nature. Our science can constrain what we think of as possible for us, and the consequences of that show up in the world as suffering in various forms, from ecological degradation and disconnection from place to injustice and the breakdown of relationships.
Perhaps surprisingly to some, Radin recommends a rather basic first step in beginning to improve our science—and, altogether with that, our understanding of ourselves, our experience of love and Nature, and our sense of what’s possible for ourselves and our world. His prescription: Study philosophy.
Obviously we need to do more than study philosophy. Moreover, we need to do more than merely study philosophy. We need to practice better philosophy, and recognize the pervasive presence of philosophy in our everyday lives—including the exceptionally bad philosophies that drive much of our economic and political activity (and sometimes our personal and professional relationships too). And we would need to approach all of this as holistically as possible, dispelling some of the barriers we have placed between philosophy, science, and the arts.
If you’d like to hear the interview with Dean Radin, I’ll put a link below.
And since I can’t write the words, “Power of Love” without thinking about that fun, upbeat tune from a famously fun and upbeat film, I’ll add a link to that as well.
Dialogue with Dean Radin
“Power of Love”