Blog · The 8 Laws of Change
Eight traits that every successful nonviolent movement is said to share — drawn from the Quakers and abolition, Gandhi, Franklin and King. We take the book seriously enough to name the problem with how the laws were derived, sketch the study that would actually test them, and say plainly why the three eights in our name, our clusters and this title are a coincidence.
Most people who encounter Stephan A. Schwartz meet him through the remote-viewing work — Project Deep Quest, the Alexandria Project, decades of controlled protocols for what he calls nonlocal awareness. The 8 Laws of Change: How to Be an Agent of Personal and Social Transformation (Park Street Press, 2015) is the other half of his life's work, and the eight laws in it are derived from the historical record rather than from a protocol. Nonlocal consciousness does appear — three of the seventeen chapters are given to it — but it is not where the laws come from. They come from a plainly historical question: when a small group of people with no money, no army and no political power has successfully changed a society, what did they have in common?
Schwartz, born in 1942, worked in the US government before turning to consciousness research full time; he has been a columnist for EXPLORE: The Journal of Science and Healing since 2005, served as executive director of the Rhine Research Center, and holds a distinguished consulting faculty appointment at Saybrook University. He also lived the subject matter — he was present in the American Civil Rights movement, which is part of why the book reads less like theory and more like field notes. It draws on more than sixteen years of historical and scientific research, and it won a 2016 Nautilus Silver Award in the social-change category.
His anchor case is the one that makes the argument hard to wave away: the Quakers and the abolition of slavery. A tiny, socially marginal, politically powerless religious minority set out to end an institution that was older than recorded history and woven into the economy of every empire on earth — and, across roughly a century, largely succeeded. Schwartz's claim is that this was not luck, and not charisma, and that the same traits recur in every nonviolent movement that worked.
Here they are as Schwartz states them — quoted in full, in his words, with nothing elided — each followed by what it actually asks of you.
Schwartz's own spelling is preserved throughout, including “foreswear” in the sixth law.
We would be breaking our own research standards if we presented the eight laws as a scientific finding, so we will not. They are a retrospective, qualitative derivation from historical cases — a different kind of claim from Schwartz's remote-viewing protocols, which are experimental and were designed to be scored blind.
The specific methodological hazard has a name: selection on the dependent variable. If you study only the movements that succeeded and extract the traits they share, you cannot yet know whether the movements that failed also shared those traits. Perhaps a hundred nonviolent, egalitarian, non-attached, integrity-driven movements were crushed and forgotten, and the eight laws describe the losers just as well as the winners. Nothing in the historical method as usually practised rules that out. Survivorship is exactly the bias that makes retrospective pattern-finding feel far more conclusive than it is.
That is a limitation, not a refutation, and it is a fixable one — we sketch the fix below. But it is why you will not see Ashta describe the eight laws as proven, evidence-based, or a law of anything in the sense that thermodynamics has laws. They are a well-argued hypothesis about how change happens, from a researcher with an unusually good record of publishing results that went against him.
Read Law 2 again: goals, but no cherished outcomes. Strip the movement context and it is a precise statement of bias control. A researcher who needs a particular result will find it — in which data to keep, which outlier to exclude, when to stop collecting, how to frame the write-up. None of that requires dishonesty; it happens to careful people who care too much about the answer.
This is not us reading our own preferences into someone else's book. It is Schwartz's own argument, and he applies it to himself: he has published a striking positive result and a clean double-blind null in the same journal. The positive was the 2019 wine study, testing whether wine that had been the focus of intentioned awareness would be preferred over an untreated control decanted from the same bottle. The null was on applied kinesiology — the muscle-testing claim — and we have written about that null and what it costs to publish one. A person who will do that is demonstrating Law 2 rather than describing it.
Which is why the parts of Ashta that are actually load-bearing map onto three of the eight, without stretching. Law 2 is why we pre-register the hypothesis and the analysis before the data exists, and why we commit in advance to publishing null results with the same prominence as positive ones — the null is our default expectation, so we have arranged not to need it to be otherwise. Law 7 — private self consistent with public posture — is the honesty discipline in operational form: we state affiliations we do not have, we name what is still unbuilt, and we do not claim a mechanism we have not shown. Law 5 is why the cooperative is member-owned and why a cluster of eight is a circle of peers rather than a practitioner and seven clients.
Held that way the eight laws are not evidence for anything. They are a statement of the ethic we are trying to work under, from a source we can name.
The coincidence is real and worth stating plainly, because if we do not, someone else will make more of it than it deserves. Ashta is Sanskrit for eight. Our working groups are clusters of eight. And here is Stephan Schwartz — a researcher we have interviewed and whose protocols we intend to replicate — with a book called The 8 Laws of Change.
These are three unrelated eights. Our clusters are eight because that is the size Lynne McTaggart's Power of Eight claim specifies, and testing a claimed dose at the claimed dose is simply how you give it nowhere to hide — as we set out in the evidence review. Schwartz's eight is a count of traits in an unrelated historical analysis; it could as easily have been six or eleven. The Sanskrit is a name.
Three eights in a row is the kind of thing that feels like a signal. It is a coincidence, we are saying so on our own website, and we would rather be the people who point that out than the people who quietly let it accumulate meaning. That instinct — notice the pattern, then check whether it survives being examined — is more or less the whole project.
The interesting thing about a retrospective claim is that it can usually be made prospective, and this one can. The fix for selection on the dependent variable is to sample on the independent one: assemble a corpus of nonviolent change movements that includes the failures as well as the successes, have coders rate each movement against the eight traits while blind to whether it succeeded, register the coding scheme and the analysis before anyone looks, and see whether the traits actually discriminate. If the eight laws separate winners from losers under those conditions, that is a genuine and important social-science result. If they do not, the book is still a fine ethical framework and one fewer thing is mistaken for evidence.
There is a smaller version we are better placed to run. Law 2 makes a claim that is testable inside a cluster of eight: that groups holding outcomes loosely make better decisions than groups gripping them. Decision quality, calibration and forecasting accuracy are all measurable, and non-attachment can be manipulated experimentally rather than merely self-reported. We want to run it. To be straight with you: it is not currently one of our pre-registered studies, and until it is, this paragraph is an intention and not a result.
Stephan Schwartz has no affiliation with, partnership with, or involvement in the Ashta Project. We reference his published work as a scientific and ethical source, exactly as we do with every other claimant in our research lineage, and we frame our own work as an independent attempt to replicate and test — never as an endorsement he has given.
His own websites are the right place to read him first-hand rather than through us:
And if you want the book itself, buy it. The Internet Archive holds a scanned copy, but it is catalogued print-disabled — readable only by patrons with a verified print disability, so it is not a way to preview the book first. The published excerpt at Reality Sandwich is freely readable, and is the source we used to verify the wording of the eight laws above. Our page on his research protocols covers the remote-viewing side, including the interview our founder recorded with him.
