"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us a universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest ... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
—Albert Einstein
On Sept. 11, 2001, between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m. (EST)—four hours before the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center occurred—several computers dedicated to a project aimed at measuring emotional fluctuations on a global level began to transmit frenzied patterns. Events such as large traffic jams or the simultaneous ignition of millions of radio and television sets seeking news channels were just some of the examples collected from computers measuring behavior that shifted from a relatively random pattern to suggesting a collective consciousness that seemed to anticipate the tragedy.
This collective anticipation before an event of global proportion possibly points toward a direct relation between hard facts and a hypothetical global consciousness. In other words, if the interpretation of the data obtained by the computers in the "Global Consciousness Project" is correct, there exists the latent possibility that events impossible to perceive consciously in humans as individuals can surprisingly be perceived in mankind as a whole.
A network of computers spanning 65 countries feed into the Global Consciousness Project (GCP) as the entire system checks for variations every second. Its goal is to obtain a unique pattern of world behavior, which, for the majority of the time, remains stable. These computers act as a "random number generator" that each second process 200 bits of information and send it to the center in Princeton for analysis.
Given the quantity of information, and the measured parameters of human conduct produced at random, these statistics tend to stabilize at a certain value. This is to say that the individual action of a person passes imperceptibly before the sea of individual actions measured every second, and the corresponding pattern recorded by the GCP can only have its value altered when a considerable number of individuals (on a global scale) alter their conduct in any measured way.
For example, if a traffic jam is forming on one side of the world, perhaps another is resolving itself on the other; if an individual turns on a radio, certainly another somewhere else turns one off. The outcome is that the pattern reflecting social conduct remains fairly constant. But when a significant social event occurs—and even before it occurs—the world graph makes a spectacular jump, which is difficult to explain according to the usual laws predicting randomness.
This "jump" in patterns that occurred during the attack on the World Trade Center is not the only instance registered by the center at Princeton. Identical anomalies were registered 24 hours before the tsunami in December 2004 that ruined the coasts of Southeast Asia, killing 250 000 people. It happened just before attacks on embassies, in the taking of hostages, the funeral of Princess Diana, the global meditation organized in January 1997 for the "Gaia Mind Project," the NATO bombing in Yugoslavia, and in the Kursk submarine accident.
Critics of the project say that while a peak in data measured at a global level may seem significant, relating this data to socially relevant events is foolish, given that events of world magnitude are continually occurring making it difficult to tell which event influenced the measured changes. Furthermore, these same values do not seem to register with similar world events, like the funeral of Mother Teresa, or the second organized Gaia Mind meditation.
Yet these critiques have failed to stop people from pondering the provocative peaks in global social patterns that point to a phenomenon that escapes our current range of comprehension. "The results of the analysis are unequivocal," say the scientists behind the GCP. "When we ask why the September 11 disaster should appear to be responsible for a strong signal in our world-wide network of instruments designed to generate random noise, there is no obvious answer. When we look carefully and discover that the EGGs [random number generating devices] might reflect our shock and dismay even before our minds and hearts express it, we confront a still deeper mystery."
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