The Source Field Investigations (35 page)

As one example, NEAR came toward the earth at 20 degrees South latitude and flew away at 72 degrees South. This path caused it to fly 13 millimeters faster, per second, than it was supposed to. That might not seem like very much, but it was definitely real—the effect could be studied with extreme precision. NASA bounced radio waves off of the probe and could measure its speed with an accuracy of zero point one millimeters per second—so a 13-millimeter change was easy to spot.

Does this mean that space probes always speed up or slow down as they swing around the earth? Strangely not. The Messenger space probe made one pass that was symmetrical—coming in at about 31 degrees North latitude, and leaving at 32 degrees South. In that case, its speed hardly changed at all. Dr. Anderson found that the more a space probe angled away from the earth’s equator as it passed by, the more its speed would change—and the more it made a nice, even path around the earth’s equator like with Messenger, the less its speed changed. This led Dr. Anderson to conclude that the movement of the earth must somehow be responsible for causing these changes in how fast the space probes are traveling—but no one seems to know why this is happening.
¹⁷
This is not something you can explain with Einstein’s theories of relativity as they now stand—but they are definitely a great start.

Even if this is nothing more than a mysterious gravitational effect, (although NASA said this is not explainable by any conventional means), it would still force us to rewrite the laws of physics. Then again, what if it has nothing to do with gravity? What if the flow of time itself is actually slowing down or speeding up?

In Einstein’s model, time isn’t expected to speed up or slow down in a given area of empty space, at least not by very much—it should essentially move at the same speed wherever you go, other than a black hole. It’s really only how fast you travel through space that determines the rate of time. The Pioneer and Flyby anomalies are different from that—because they actually suggest that the rate of time can change in a given local area. And when we bring in Shnoll, we have stunning new evidence that this is happening all the time, and we just didn’t know about it before. When our satellites speed up or slow down as they pass by the earth, we’re only looking at a change of 13 millimeters per second—which is only one-millionth of their normal traveling speed—so it is a subtle effect that was easily missed for many years.

The rotation of the earth appears to be creating a ripple in the flow of time—almost like a lawn sprinkler spraying out time flow as the earth spins, caused by the movement of what we are calling the Source Field. What if the Sun’s energy could also give a nice little push to the flow of time—not a huge amount, but more like the 13 millimeters per second we saw with our space probes? If true, this would be most likely visible when the Sun’s energetic activity suddenly peaked. Based on the worldwide changes Shnoll observed, we may discover that every atom and every energy wave on earth would be affected by the Sun’s behavior. And furthermore, since our brains are electrical systems, perhaps a sudden, unexpected hiccup in the flow of time would cause some disruptions in our brain wave patterns as well—which might make us feel uncomfortable, stressed out and overly emotional. If so, that might lead to outbreaks of war, violence and economic collapse.

Enter A. L. Tchijevsky, a Russian scientist in the early twentieth century. Tchijevsky created an “Index of Mass Human Excitability” to study how chaotic and turbulent life on earth was in seventy-two different countries, for almost 2,500 years—from 500 B.C. to A.D. 1922. He looked for any obvious signals that people were really unhappy, such as wars, revolutions, riots, economic upsets, expeditions and migrations. He also ranked how severe these events were by how many people were involved. To his amazement, “Tchijevsky found that fully 80 percent of the most significant events occurred during the 5 years of maximum sunspot activity.”
¹⁸
The sunspot cycle does not always run in an eleven-year interval—sometimes it comes sooner, sometimes later. Nonetheless, whenever solar activity was at its maximum, a whopping 80 percent of all the most negative events took place.

The Institute of HeartMath’s reconstruction of Tchijevsky’s discovery of a precise relationship between solar activity and civil unrest.

Sadly, Tchijevsky served thirty years in Soviet prisons for merely pointing out that the Russian Revolution of 1917 occurred during the height of the sunspot cycle. The Communists were adamant in their belief that there is no God. The last thing they wanted was to be accused of creating their revolution right when the Sun’s activity was influencing them into doing it.

Now think back to what we learned in chapter 5. Seven thousand people were able to reduce worldwide terrorism by 72 percent, simply by meditating. They also reduced random acts of violence, deaths and hostilities between nations. With Shnoll, we discovered that the movement of our planet around the Sun affects every atom on earth in very measurable ways. Now with Tchijevsky, we see that solar activity has a direct effect on how we feel. As the Sun’s activity increases, we feel an increasing sense of stress—and violence breaks out all over the world. As the Sun’s activity decreases, we recover from the stress—and only 20 percent of the most negative events take place. This effect held true for the entire 2,500-year length of time that Tchijevsky studied.

If our model is correct, then we can assume that these changes in solar activity would also create changes in the flow of time. This, in turn, could interrupt the normally smooth flow of our brain wave patterns, causing us to feel uncomfortable without really knowing why. It would be very difficult for us to measure any changes in the flow of time with clocks based on earth, as they would also speed up or slow down at the same rate as the flow of time itself. However, we could check the speed of the earth’s rotation, because the Sun is at a fixed position in the sky—so we have something stable, which is outside the earth, to compare it to.

In 1959, there was a huge solar storm—and the earth’s rotation slowed down at the exact same time. This made the length of a typical day suddenly increase. Then an even greater storm occurred in August 1972—and according to John Gribbin and NASA scientist Stephen Plagemann in the prestigious journal
Nature
, “We have indeed found a discontinuous change in the length of day . . . immediately after that event.”
¹⁹
The earth “hiccupped” in its orbit during a massive solar storm. Indeed, many scientists have found clear connections between solar activity and the length of the day.
²⁰
In fact, there is a perfect relationship between the amount of solar activity and the speed of the earth’s rotation throughout “much of the last forty years of the twentieth century”
²¹
—from 1960 onward. Bear in mind that 1950 was the first year that we had really good data to track the exact length of a day, and prior to 1920 the available data is even worse.
²²
Solar activity also changes the speed that our atmosphere is traveling around the earth—though there is a delay between the solar activity and the resulting change in the overall speed of the atmosphere.
²³
According to Djurovic in 1990, “The physical mechanism of these phenomena is still unknown.”
²⁴

Another possible example of a change in the flow of time occurs when the planet Mercury starts moving backward, or retrograde, in its path through our night sky. Almost every astrologer will tell you from personal and professional experience that during this time, mechanical devices seem more likely to break down—perhaps because of disruptions in the flow of electricity—and people seem more likely to get into arguments with each other and have problems erupt. Even mainstream media outlets like
Wired
magazine
²⁵
and CNet
²⁶
have commented on this curious phenomenon, thanks to the brave journalism of Daniel Terdiman. Now that we know about Professor Shnoll’s work, we can speculate about whether the flow of time itself gets disrupted when planets go into retrograde movement.

In August 2010, researchers from Stanford and Purdue universities added even more new data to the mix. These scientists were studying the decay rates of radioactive materials, just like Shnoll had done. As far as they knew, these rates were supposed to be constant and unchanging—but that’s not what happened. Instead, they found some new variations on what Shnoll had already been tracking for years.

These changes in solar activity not only seem to alter the flow of time—they also accelerate the amount of negative events happening, or what Tchijevsky called “Human Excitability.” Would it also have a similar effect on the strength of our intuitive and psychic abilities? Dr. James Spottiswoode studied twenty years’ worth of solid, scientific research into “anomalous cognition,” where ordinary people were tested to see how psychic they were. After exploring fifty-one different studies conducted from 1976 to 1996, which added up to a total of 2,879 different individual trials, he found that solar activity had a clear and measurable influence on our psychic ability.
²⁸
In general, the more solar activity there was, the less effective we were in these “anomalous cognition” tests.

Now we have the strong suggestion that a burst of energy from the Sun can slow down time. The earth then rotates more slowly—though no one seems to understand why. This may also create stress in the human mind, by disrupting the electrical activity in our synapses—the level of coherence in our minds. This shock to the brain could lead to an increase in violence, war and unrest. When the Sun was calm, only 20 percent of these “Human Excitability” events took place—throughout the last 2,500 years. It may be that when the flow of time becomes smoother, the coherence increases. Our brain waves mellow out, and everyone gets along better with each other. This smoothing-out of our brain wave patterns may also help us go into deeper states of consciousness—thus increasing our performance on “anomalous cognition” tests.

If these cycles can push against us, and change the way we behave, then can we also push back? If high solar activity makes the flow of time more choppy, creating disruptions that slow down time, and low solar activity makes the flow of time smoother, then can we affect the flow of time as well? If everyone on earth was suddenly shocked by a negative event, would that cause a sudden flickering in the passage of time—disrupting coherence on a worldwide level? And if enough of us meditate, could we smooth out the flow of time—in a way that Shnoll would be able to concretely measure in his laboratory?

This brings us to Dr. Roger Nelson’s work with the Global Consciousness Project. Beginning in 1979, Dr. Robert Jahn started the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory to study “whether sensitive electronic devices . . . might be affected by special states of consciousness, including strong emotions and directed intention.”
²⁹
Dr. Roger Nelson joined the team in 1980, and ultimately became the main force behind this research. Early along, Jahn and Nelson decided to see if the human mind could create any sort of measurable effect on “a well-developed commercial source of electronic white noise.”
³⁰
Shnoll was studying the flow of electricity as well, as one of his physical reactions—so now we have two different groups looking at the same thing.

Jahn and Nelson wanted to turn that electrical noise into numbers they could graph out and measure. That way, if a person could actually affect the flow of electricity in some way, they could prove it mathematically. They decided the best way to do this was to create a random-number generator. This measures how smoothly electricity is flowing through a circuit: Any hiccups in the flow of electricity will create regular patterns in the numbers it generates. Once we see a pattern, the numbers aren’t as random anymore. Of course, in conventional science, time isn’t supposed to slow down and speed up as electricity moves along. However, if time did start slowing down and speeding up within a random electrical circuit, then the numbers would indeed begin developing patterns—which you could then measure and graph out. Shnoll was also looking for these exact sorts of patterns in physical, chemical, biological and radioactive reactions—but he never expected to find effects that could be caused by the human mind.