 The mirroring relation between individual and world consciousness
In 1998, a huge scientific experiment was being set up in Princeton, New Jersey, on the purpose of checking if there is such thing as a world consciousness. The experiment is called The Global Consciousness Project and it uses a global network of physical random number generators located in 65 host sites around the world to collect data and associate it with major global events. There were at least two crucial moments in the history of this project, when the functioning path of the system recorded a shift: the day of Lady Diana’s funerals and the terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001. The changes recorded back then pointed out that when something big is happening in the world, a global consciousness is activated.
Consciousness is most often defined as the ability to be aware of ourselves (self consciousness) and what surrounds us and it is said to reach its highest level in human beings. But what if there is something beyond the individual consciousness? Apparently, consciousness relates to our inward nature and it would seem out-of-line to talk about the existence of a world’s common consciousness. But the concept of world consciousness is gathering more and more adepts these days and, moreover, it is often seen as a way to approach the milestones that we are currently facing as society.
In order to start understanding what world consciousness could possibly refer to, it is enough just to imagine all the individuals together as a huge creature. Would this creature be endowed with a consciousness of its own? As most of the creatures, it would be. This is world consciousness: a way the entire world looks back at itself, similarly to how each of us looks back at himself through his own consciousness. The world consciousness is based on and reflects individual consciousnesses. But just as a society is not only a sum of individuals, world consciousness goes far beyond the consciousnesses of all the individuals put together. World consciousness lays also on the way we, as individuals endowed with consciousness, interrelate within families, work groups, social groups and report ourselves to something bigger than us.
The fact is that few of us are aware of the impact we make at macro-level. Most of us fail to see that there is something higher and more meaningful than our own consciousness and by this we rob ourselves of a bigger sense of identity. World consciousness exists in spite of our unawareness and ignorance, but it limps and fails to give us an integrated and coherent vision on life and its inherent problems. According to Jiddu Krishnamurti, we are the world. None of our experiences is isolated from a global context or has an isolated meaning, reserved only to our understanding, and everything that happens externally resonates in a way within us. There is a Hawaiian practice called Ho’oponopono that recommends seeing anything that happens outside, in the world, as something within us. We only exist in relation with the rest of the world and any tentative to break this liaison is meant to failure. The sooner we understand this, the stronger our world consciousness will be.
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