A lull in the action
After the hustle and bustle of our Spring Training jaunt, I’ve managed to find myself on the deck of a house in the Berkshires on a March day that’s so sunny I can sit in an undershirt, listen to the snow melt, and put some thoughts together. This must be what it feels like to have a grant to spend a summer at a writers’ colony. Sadly, I only have two days here, but it’s a start.
So here’s what’s been cooking since we came back from Florida – a lot. At Spring Training, we serendipitously managed to meet the right people, and thereby earn the right to drop some pretty powerful names in all future conversations. We now find ourselves negotiating with Major League Baseball (aka MLB) about a contract to pursue licensing rights and permissions. Who knew that we needed MLB’s official OK to put pictures on our website that show Fenway Park in the background? Or that even mentioning the phrase “the Boston Red Sox” comes at a price? That’s what lawyers are for, and that’s what we’re pursuing. They’ll help us with everything from getting trademark protection for an official Joy of Sox logo to gaining permission from MLB to use video clips of key game situations in our movie. We’ll have to be selective with that highlight film, though, at $12,000 per minute (not a misprint)!
And how will we fund this? The honest answer is, we don’t really know. But we do know that we’ve been riding on a wave of momentum that has opened so many other doors that it seems like it might also include the one marked “Financial Support”. There have been too many good omens recently to ignore, and a couple are worth mentioning here. For starters – Oprah. Her recent promotion of a New Age book called The Secret caused quite a flap, and it has a Joy of Sox spin. By featuring that book on two recent episodes, she has singlehandedly sent the book, and its topic of intentionality, to the top of the bestseller list. Intentionality has been a mainstay of the New Age movement for some years, but now it’s mainsteam. Our movie has an odd link to that book. Turns out the original limited-release version of The Secret DVD included clips of Esther and Jerry Hicks, impresarios of the Abraham workshops and books (Ask and It Is Yours, and the like). They backed out because of contract issues, and thereby missed inclusion when the revised version became a #1 best seller. Similarly, they didn’t give us permission to use video clips of my Q&A with Abraham last fall (see the Oct. 21, 2006 blog entry for the full story), in part because of their negative experience with The Secret – again missing out on a chance to be part of another bestseller!
Another sign - several friends have passed on to me a recent New York Times commentary piece on Rituals, called “If You Want the Yankees to Win, the Key Plays Are at Home”. It’s a funny send-off of fan superstitions, and how widespread the belief is that the quirky private practices you do at home set the stage for big victories by the home town team. The writer skillfully mocks every one of the key points of Joy of Sox, which means only one thing – we’ve got to interview him for our documentary! Joel’s has already been in touch, and it would be a hoot, especially for our “Features” section at the end of the DVD, where we teach fans some energy techniques to maximize their impact on their team. Now we can throw in a bit about lucky t-shirts and staring at TVs, and the pennant will be ours once again.
Reviewing some of our interviews has also given me a better sense of how important team chemistry is. ’04 funnyman Kevin Millar described how important it is for the players to be likeable in the fans’ eyes. He told us that the ’04 Sox were all “normal-looking”, and easy to identify with. Not so many superstars, more like the lunch bucket crowd that fans can feel they know. I suspect that this ready identification makes it easier for the fans’ prayers to connect energetically with their beneficiaries, the players. That’s tte thrust of the most recent scientific studies on prayer - if the people sending the distant prayers don’t even know their patients/subjects, then their prayers seem to have less benefit. A stronger emotional connection may literally enhance the physical impact of prayers – it’s like the scene from the 80’s movie “Ghost”, when the recently deceased Patrick Swayze gets coached by a subway-dwelling ghost on how to harness strong emotions like anger to help manipulate such physical objects as beer cans and pennies (that bit of poltergest training is more advanced than any material we’ll include in our film!). Not that this movie example proves anything (apart from the fact that I may take things too literally), but it helps illustrate the point about how prayers might connect fans and players.
Another element of team cohesion that we learned about was the importance of the players’ affection for one another. Millar talked about how much the ’04 Sox teammates liked one another, and even nodded his assent when I said it sounded like they loved one another. Same with Johnny Pesky – his memories of the Ted Williams-led 1946 Sox were highlighted by the sense that the players genuinely liked and cared about each other. They had the bond of affection, and maybe that also meant that their hearts were energetically synched-up. It’s too late to do the measurements on that team, of course, but these anecdotes all fit right in with the Joy of Sox hypothesis.
The last piece that’s starting to come together now is the measurement bit. I’ve had some great conversations with an inventor and researcher who has develped a refinement to the Princeton REG devices, advances which increase the sensitivity of the measurements to the point where the emotional fluctuations of groups of people can be detected. He admits that some of the questions we’re asking in our film have never been addressed (ie, is there any residual cohesion in an empty baseball stadium), but that’s part of why he’s been so good about helping out. He’s a scientist at heart, and he wants to know what the truth of the matter is. So hopefully we’ll have our computers rigged up with their stateof-the-art software in time to get some offseason readings at Fenway. We want to find out what’s the baseline level of energy coherence at this supposed sacred site, before the hordes descend for the season’s first home game on April 10. Tune in to next month’s blog, and you might get some answers.
So here’s what’s been cooking since we came back from Florida – a lot. At Spring Training, we serendipitously managed to meet the right people, and thereby earn the right to drop some pretty powerful names in all future conversations. We now find ourselves negotiating with Major League Baseball (aka MLB) about a contract to pursue licensing rights and permissions. Who knew that we needed MLB’s official OK to put pictures on our website that show Fenway Park in the background? Or that even mentioning the phrase “the Boston Red Sox” comes at a price? That’s what lawyers are for, and that’s what we’re pursuing. They’ll help us with everything from getting trademark protection for an official Joy of Sox logo to gaining permission from MLB to use video clips of key game situations in our movie. We’ll have to be selective with that highlight film, though, at $12,000 per minute (not a misprint)!
And how will we fund this? The honest answer is, we don’t really know. But we do know that we’ve been riding on a wave of momentum that has opened so many other doors that it seems like it might also include the one marked “Financial Support”. There have been too many good omens recently to ignore, and a couple are worth mentioning here. For starters – Oprah. Her recent promotion of a New Age book called The Secret caused quite a flap, and it has a Joy of Sox spin. By featuring that book on two recent episodes, she has singlehandedly sent the book, and its topic of intentionality, to the top of the bestseller list. Intentionality has been a mainstay of the New Age movement for some years, but now it’s mainsteam. Our movie has an odd link to that book. Turns out the original limited-release version of The Secret DVD included clips of Esther and Jerry Hicks, impresarios of the Abraham workshops and books (Ask and It Is Yours, and the like). They backed out because of contract issues, and thereby missed inclusion when the revised version became a #1 best seller. Similarly, they didn’t give us permission to use video clips of my Q&A with Abraham last fall (see the Oct. 21, 2006 blog entry for the full story), in part because of their negative experience with The Secret – again missing out on a chance to be part of another bestseller!
Another sign - several friends have passed on to me a recent New York Times commentary piece on Rituals, called “If You Want the Yankees to Win, the Key Plays Are at Home”. It’s a funny send-off of fan superstitions, and how widespread the belief is that the quirky private practices you do at home set the stage for big victories by the home town team. The writer skillfully mocks every one of the key points of Joy of Sox, which means only one thing – we’ve got to interview him for our documentary! Joel’s has already been in touch, and it would be a hoot, especially for our “Features” section at the end of the DVD, where we teach fans some energy techniques to maximize their impact on their team. Now we can throw in a bit about lucky t-shirts and staring at TVs, and the pennant will be ours once again.
Reviewing some of our interviews has also given me a better sense of how important team chemistry is. ’04 funnyman Kevin Millar described how important it is for the players to be likeable in the fans’ eyes. He told us that the ’04 Sox were all “normal-looking”, and easy to identify with. Not so many superstars, more like the lunch bucket crowd that fans can feel they know. I suspect that this ready identification makes it easier for the fans’ prayers to connect energetically with their beneficiaries, the players. That’s tte thrust of the most recent scientific studies on prayer - if the people sending the distant prayers don’t even know their patients/subjects, then their prayers seem to have less benefit. A stronger emotional connection may literally enhance the physical impact of prayers – it’s like the scene from the 80’s movie “Ghost”, when the recently deceased Patrick Swayze gets coached by a subway-dwelling ghost on how to harness strong emotions like anger to help manipulate such physical objects as beer cans and pennies (that bit of poltergest training is more advanced than any material we’ll include in our film!). Not that this movie example proves anything (apart from the fact that I may take things too literally), but it helps illustrate the point about how prayers might connect fans and players.
Another element of team cohesion that we learned about was the importance of the players’ affection for one another. Millar talked about how much the ’04 Sox teammates liked one another, and even nodded his assent when I said it sounded like they loved one another. Same with Johnny Pesky – his memories of the Ted Williams-led 1946 Sox were highlighted by the sense that the players genuinely liked and cared about each other. They had the bond of affection, and maybe that also meant that their hearts were energetically synched-up. It’s too late to do the measurements on that team, of course, but these anecdotes all fit right in with the Joy of Sox hypothesis.
The last piece that’s starting to come together now is the measurement bit. I’ve had some great conversations with an inventor and researcher who has develped a refinement to the Princeton REG devices, advances which increase the sensitivity of the measurements to the point where the emotional fluctuations of groups of people can be detected. He admits that some of the questions we’re asking in our film have never been addressed (ie, is there any residual cohesion in an empty baseball stadium), but that’s part of why he’s been so good about helping out. He’s a scientist at heart, and he wants to know what the truth of the matter is. So hopefully we’ll have our computers rigged up with their stateof-the-art software in time to get some offseason readings at Fenway. We want to find out what’s the baseline level of energy coherence at this supposed sacred site, before the hordes descend for the season’s first home game on April 10. Tune in to next month’s blog, and you might get some answers.
posted by Rick Leskowitz,MD at 10:05 AM
2 Comments:
This is great news! Congratulations on a successful trip to Florida. I am eagerly awaiting the results of your software at Fenway. Might be interesting to try out a reading at Hingham Abbey or the Cowley Fathers in Cambridge to get the comparison in sacred space where there is ritual prayer several times a day.
Good ideas - thanks for the suggestions. Today's post describes a somewhat similar attempt to measure what goes on during a healing session. We still have a lot of bugs in the system to work out, before we can generate reliable information, but we're getting there!
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