23. COLLECTIVE COHERENCE

THIS [STUDY] SUGGESTS THAT WHEN MILLIONS TO BILLIONS OF PEOPLE BECOME COHERENTLY FOCUSED, THAT THE AMOUNT OF PHYSICAL COHERENCE OR ORDER IN THE WORLD ALSO INCREASES.
– D. I. Radin

Before I met with Jahn and Dunne, Generon had an opportunity to work with one of their key scientists at PEAR, Dean Radin. Susan Taylor and I were working with a senior team at a global pharmaceutical firm codesigning a U-process Innovation Lab. The design team met for three days with a number of scientists and thought leaders from various fields, focusing on human transformation. Radin was among those; he prepared over a hundred PowerPoint slides reflecting the essence of his work over his professional career. He had worked with Willis at SRI on the remote viewing program, with Jahn and Dunne at PEAR for a number of years, and at AT&T Bell labs and GTE laboratories on advanced telecommunications systems. He has conducted research on extraordinary human functioning for almost two decades. His two books, The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds, are highly regarded by peer researchers and theorists.

During our many telephone conferences and his presentations to us, Radin described what are known as “field consciousness studies,” a term coined by Roger Nelson at PEAR during the mid-1990s. The essence of this research is to determine whether the behavior of a group can influence the output of an RNG (random number generator) and under what circumstances it may do so. The technology today has allowed scientists to build extremely accurate portable RNGs. Researchers took these portable RNGs to places where groups were engaged in an activity calling for highly focused attention, as in meditation or Bohmian Dialogue. Such field experiments have been conducted since about 1995 in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Over a hundred of these experiments have taken place, reflecting that groups do in fact appear to be capable of influencing nearby RNGs. They were conducted at theatrical performances, scientific conferences, Native American rituals, Japanese festivals, sports competitions, and live television broadcasts.

The findings were so striking that in 1997 Nelson began an international research project called the Global Consciousness Project (GCP). Nelson and his colleagues created an Internet-based, worldwide network of RNGs. By 2005, sixty-five RNGs located around the world were engaged in a continuously running field consciousness experiment. Their output is collected continuously and fed via the Internet to computers in which the data is stored and analyzed. By April 2005, Nelson and his international consortium of scientists had analyzed almost two hundred events of global interest, including natural disasters, New Year celebrations, terrorist activity, large-scale meditations, sports events, outbreaks of war, and tragic deaths of well-known figures and celebrities. Many showed the predicted influence registering on the network.

By far, the most dramatic events analyzed were those of September 11, 2001, when the RNGs around the world behaved in highly nonrandom ways. The GCP Network registered the single largest drop for any day in 2001. The GCP team published their findings in the journal Foundation of Physics Letters. According to their analysis, the minute-by-minute behavior of the statistics across the global network matches the chronology of the terrorist attacks, with the nonrandom behavior beginning around 5:00 a.m. and peaking around 11:00 a.m. Eastern (US) Daylight Time, staying extremely deviant into the evening, with odds against chance of a million to one. Radin said to us, the team believed the nonrandom behavior was the change in humanity’s collective attention that day.

Referring to the project’s work from August 1998 through April 2005, Radin concluded, “This suggests that when millions to billions of people become coherently focused, that the amount of physical coherence or order in the world also increases.” Roger Nelson concurred:

We do not have a theoretical understanding of the sort that must underlie robust interpretations … but I would like to describe a speculation … that the instruments have captured the reaction of a global consciousness…. The results from this scientific study are an apparent manifestation of the ancient idea that we are all interconnected, and that what we think and feel has an effect on others.

At the conclusion of this time of deliberation, I formulated the first two of what eventually became four principles. These two reflected all I had learned since my first meeting with Bohm in London in 1980.

1. There is an open and emergent quality to the universe.
A group of simple components can suddenly reemerge at a higher level of self-organization, as a new entity with new properties. We can’t find a cause or reason for this emergent quality, but as we experience it again and again, we see that the universe offers infinite possibility.

2. The universe is a domain of undivided wholeness; both the material world and consciousness are parts of the same undivided whole.
The totality of existence is enfolded within each fragment of space and time – whether it is a single object, thought, or event. Thus, everything in the universe, including human intentions and ways of being, affects everything else, because everything is part of the same unbroken whole.

Although I was satisfied with what I had concluded, two important questions remained for me: What is the Source of our capacity to access the knowledge for action we need at the moment? How can we learn to reliably enable that capacity individually and collectively?