For nearly 30 years, IONS’ researchers have explored the frontiers of consciousness—probing the boldest questions about who we are and what we are capable of becoming. Our work takes us into the complex territory that lies between inner experience and the outer world. It moves us between the richness of direct knowing and the rigor of open-minded science.

IONS’ research is grounded in the conviction that our capacities as humans are far greater than what our dominant worldview suggests, nurtures, or trains us to believe. We live in a society that strongly emphasizes the material and physical aspects of reality. While this perspective has proven to be remarkably powerful in the progress of Western civilization, it ignores the wholeness of life—it neglects those aspects of ourselves that we understand through the spiritual and mystical traditions. This is the forgotten wisdom we need to integrate and develop into twenty-first-century solutions. It is a vision of the whole that informs our work, and fires our passion for exploration in the service of a better world.

Through careful examination of the unasked questions, IONS is involved in the generation of new knowledge and new opportunities for our evolution as a species. By tackling our beliefs and expectations directly, we are led to a new view of reality in which separation is replaced by relationship as an organizing principle in life. It is our hypothesis that a deeper understanding of consciousness can lead to new and expanded views of reality in which objective and subjective, outer and inner, are understood as equal aspects of the miracle and mystery of being. We are helping to change science from the inside out. No longer are scientists merely objective analysts of a world “out there.” Rather, as consciousness investigators, we participate in a world in which we are embedded. By helping expand our vision of possibilities and validate interiority, our goal is to provide results with socially relevant implications that may help to reduce human suffering.

During the past three decades, we have documented ways in which beliefs, thoughts, and intentions are powerful forces that directly shape aspects of reality. By exploring human experience—including creativity, intuition, love, and transcendence—we have helped the beginnings of a global mind change, now evident in many areas of modern culture. Complementary and alternative medicine are examples. Twenty years ago, the mind-body healing paradigm was held by only a few alternative thinkers; today it is reported on the front page of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. This new frontier is beginning to go mainstream, and our research has been important in helping stimulate the shift.

Partner Initiatives

Our relationship-centered approach is reflected in our emphasis on collaboration. IONS has forged strategic alliances with several research and educational centers. For example, in partnership with the Institute for Health and Healing at California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC), we have initiated a series of clinical studies to investigate the power of prayer and distant intentionality in health and healing. The cell biology laboratory at CPMC allows us to bring the strengths of genetics into our program, studying the effects of subtle energy practitioners on gene expression in cancer cells. Our collaboration with the Esalen Institute brings us into conversations with scientists at the forefront of evolutionary theory, helping to map our role as conscious agents in the evolutionary process. Through a series of invitational conferences, we are also working with Esalen to explore the evidence for survival of consciousness following bodily death. Partnership with Duke University Medical Center allows us to examine the value of noetic interventions with cardiology patients. Work with the Chopra Center for Wellbeing and Bastyr University gives us the opportunity to bring ancient wisdom practices into a modern psychophysiology laboratory. And our new series of online games (“Garden of Dreams”) extends research into people’s homes and provides a way of engaging potentially very large numbers of people in our program.

As IONS settles into its new home on the 200-acre campus in Northern California, we have recently completed construction of our new Consciousness Research Laboratory. The new facility provides a context in which to study the psychological, social, physical, and psychophysiological aspects of nonordinary states of consciousness. We will focus on distant healing, subtle energies, biofield healing, and exceptional states of consciousness obtained through meditation and other forms of mental and physical discipline. Using the new laboratory, our scientists will measure changes in brainwaves, heart rate, and skin conductance, and develop technology to measure subtle fields that may be generated by healers from different traditions. Proposed projects include studies of love and relationship, the effect of attention and intention training on distant healing, the role of intuition in medical diagnosis, the effects of meditation on global consciousness, and the evolutionary potential of transformational practices. Building on previous work on remote observation by Marilyn Schlitz of IONS and Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire, we are collaborating with the Samueli Institute to explore the possible role of experimenter intention on studies of distant healing. Under the direction of Dean Radin of IONS, we are conducting experiments that raise fundamental questions about space and time. In each case, there will be opportunities for IONS members to participate in studies and to help us map the emerging field of noetic sciences.

We have assembled a premiere team of physicians, molecular geneticists, psi researchers, psychophysiologists, engineers, anthropologists, psychologists, and alternative healers. We also collaborate with scholars and scientists exploring theory and practice. We cast a wide net of methods by combining qualitative and quantitative approaches, pushing existing tools and pathfinding new approaches to the science of consciousness. Our goal is to bring this critical mass of scientists, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students into an environment that nourishes true collaboration, promotes cross-fertilization of ideas and high creativity, and provides state-of-the-art technology. Our approach involves the novel inclusion of “energy” healers and “intuitives” as full participants in the formulation of research questions and design. We are committed to rigor in all facets of our research, and to using our work to help improve the human condition.

Popular literature on healing and the mind tends to suggest that survival from life-threatening illnesses encourages a process of self-transformation. To test this assumption, seventeen long-term survivors of metastatic cancer were interviewed about the impact of a life-threatening condition on their life stories. Contrary to the existing literature, which suggests such an event greatly transforms the individual, nearly all of those interviewed for this study framed their unusual recoveries as being largely unremarkable. Traditional North American cultural values, which normalize adversity, appear to bolster the participants’ belief that one can have control over one’s health, and can even resist a recurrence of cancer. The results of the study, which build on an extensive program on remission and extended survival, have recently been published in Qualitative Health Research (Vol. 12, February 2002). Marilyn Schlitz and Nola Lewis have published a chapter on prayer and healing in The Alternative Breast Book: Leading Voices on Alternative Approaches to Breast Cancer (Pocket Books, 2002). In addition, IONS has recently completed a new video in which cancer survivors tell their stories of recovery. Called Stories of Hope, the 30-minute video will be available on the IONS website.

Marilyn Schlitz, Director of Research