CONNECTED: The Emergence of Global Consciousness

"Someday after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love, and then for the second time in the history of the world, man will discover fire." – Teilhard de Chardin

The poetic pen of the great mystic and scientist Teilhard de Chardin motivates us, with the above dictum, to consider the transformative, creative power of love and connectedness. Roger Nelson in his book "Connected" narrates the story of the discovery of the first glimpse of this creative force as uncovered and recorded in the project that he has been leading for the last twenty years or so.

It seems that the 'Noosphere' of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Vladimir Vernadsky has for the first time in history sent its weak yet traceable signals through Roger Nelson's "Global Consciousness Project" (GSP). The book tells this fascinating story and provides the fullest possible account to the reader in a vivid and captivating exposition supported by rigorous and unparalleled experimental evidence.

Two decades of careful research on the presence of coherence in the fluctuations of - the only - network of random number generators spread all over the globe was the instrument for this path-breaking discovery. Roger Nelson, in this 'tour de force', describes with meticulous epistemological and methodological detail what it took them, him and his global partners and co-workers, to demonstrate the creation of order within genuine randomness due to coherent consciousness states in the world. Here is the opening the "Global Consciousness Project" web-page, the twenty-year-long running project that the book introduces us to and communicate its inner story: "Subtle interactions link us with each other and the Earth. When human consciousness becomes coherent, the behaviour of random systems may change. Random number generators (RNGs) based on quantum tunnelling produce completely unpredictable sequences of zeroes and ones. But when a great event synchronizes the feelings of millions of people, our network of RNGs becomes subtly structured. We calculate one in a trillion odds that the effect is due to chance. The evidence suggests an emerging noosphere or the unifying field of consciousness described by sages in all cultures." (http://noosphere.princeton.edu/)

The background where Roger Nelson comes from is the pioneering work of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory (PEAR-Lab, succeeded by ICRL, see "icrl.org"), where the use of random number generators based on Josephson junction diodes via quantum tunnelling was initiated and perfected. The results that intention influences deviation from randomness were established by the seminal work of the lab led by Robert G. Jahn and Brenda Dunne. Building on this line of work Roger Nelson envisioned and founded, in 1998, an international team of researchers supervising a globally distributed network of Random Number Generators (RNGs) that has spanned the earth ever since. The equipment and the software that collects the data are of excellent quality, robust, dependable and not at all prone to temperature, electromagnetic or any other known possible physical disturbance. Many technical tests have to be passed before these RNGs qualify to become sensors and detectors of deviations from randomness. The project's 'nickname', EGG, means 'Electro-Gaia-Gram', is a play on words reflecting analogies and metaphorically pointing to EEG, the 'Electro-Encephalo-Gram', the recordings for brain waves. So, each RNG of the EGG records "noosphere's" waves!

The thesis that intention and emotion might induce correlations in physical systems and thus departure from total randomness in the signal as would have been expected by the standard physics models for RNGs was put to a test over this EGG/RNG network. Data from great events of historical dimension (like the 9/11and other terrorist attacks), mass celebrations (like New Year's Eve, Global Peace Meditation etc.), big spiritual gatherings, and even mundane big international sports events and Saint Valentine's in total around 500 formally specified events, have been gathered and analysed over these years.

The over all results from all databases collected have a striking bottom line: "The overall result is highly significant. The odds against chance are more than a trillion to one"! Even if the effects are small in magnitude and the correlations sometimes feeble, their statistical significance is beyond any doubt.

Roger Nelson, as his book brilliantly narrates, used the long held and cherished scientific principle that by doing careful statistics bias decreases as the number of independent observations increases. Hence, he and his network's co-workers managed to increase the objectivity of their study to the levels of Higgs Boson discovery! Now, Higgs Boson discovery estimated cost rises to $13 billion. The GSP's budget can be estimated to some thousands of dollars (excluding of course the time and expertise provided by its volunteer member base). That makes a difference that scales to a factor of a million to one! The contrast between the reception of these two discoveries is as strong as their budget's difference. This is a very clear demonstration of the immense cultural bias and unreasonable ideological prejudice of today's mainstream science!

It is true that we still lack an overarching physico-mathematical, theoretical, model that could account for the phenomena observed in the book at hand. That is why similar kind of data are disregarded as anecdotal, or simply ignored. But observations cannot be denied forever, this is the way real science has taught us. This is where our intention ought to focus next, it matters.

Yes, it is exactly such kind of non-local consciousness research that might profoundly affect the future, and in an inversely proportional way, more than research on the standard models of physics. We fast approach the moment where "... for the second time in the history of the world, man will discover fire" as Teilhard de Chardin prophesied. As the reader will find out from this captivating book we know now that we are fundamentally connected and intentions do matter, after all.