If FieldREG responds to meaningful activity within small groups, what about the entire planet? In August of 1998, the PEAR lab's Roger Nelson and collaborators began building a network of Random Event Generators to find out. This ongoing project is known as the Global Consciousness Project, or GCP.

Since 1998, the network has grown to about 65 host sites around the world. Each site consists of a Random Event Generator and computer, running custom software. The software records a 200-bit trial sum once every second, continuously over months and years. This data is then sent over the internet to a server in Princeton, NJ, USA, where it is archived and analyzed.

This kind of "global FieldREG" experiment has allowed the GCP to monitor the network for significant anomalies, which might be correlated to "global events," such as earthquakes, big elections, or major organized meditations. These are occasions of large-scale shared attention, and often of shared emotions.

GCP investigation might go several ways. In one, a particular world event is anticipated (such as the Superbowl), after which, the cumulative data from the REG network would be examined during or very near this time. Since the cumulative REG data is supposed to be random, a statistically significant deviation from chance results is considered evidence of a relationship. In other words, what the GCP would be measuring are changes in the "consciousness field," but on a global scale.

Alternately, the REG network may be monitored for significant anomalies, which correlate with unanticipated world events, such as natural disasters. For example, during the May 27, 2006 earthquake, which killed 3,000 Indonesians, the cumulative REG data deviated from expectation by z = 2.513 (1). The odds of this happening by chance are about 1 in 167. These results are actually typical for major earthquakes.

Strikingly, the GCP has found that the REGs will start to show anomalies slightly before global events actually happen. This happened with for the same Indonesian earthquake, when the REGs began deviating about an hour before the actual quake, and continued for 8 more hours. The speculation is that some aspect of collective consciousness is, at some level, able to sense significant oncoming events. While it is unclear whether this collective consciousness anticipates future events based on current events, or whether it receives information about them by retro-causality (mentioned before), the phenomena certainly seems promising for mitigating damage and loss of life.

Roger Nelson and his collaborators believe that the GCP is telling us something very important: that we are more connected to each other than we realize, and that there is real power in human focus and cooperation. Transcendental Meditators believe this, too. They point to evidence from their own studies that suggest city crime rates drop significantly, when collective TM meditations are practiced there (2).

Keeping these two things in mind, perhaps we can learn something about what it will take to achieve a more peaceful existence in our communities and in the world.

(1) http://noosphere.princeton.edu/quake.indonesia.html

(2) http://www.tm.org/discover/research/charts/g1.html

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