Monday, February 17, 2014

that we can't see

"Are you thinking what I am thinking," there are moments in life when our thoughts for some mysterious reasons coincide with others'. Did it ever occur to you this might be just the tip of an iceberg, semblance of something fundamental at work that we consciously know little about?

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), a French Jesuit priest who was also a prominent paleontologist involved with the discovery of Peking Men in China, believed in an upwardly moving cosmos that had gone through several breakthroughs in its eons past--progressing from inanimated matter to organic biosphere, single cells to complex life forms, then the advent of mankind and their "thought", that invisible "within" that makes them the crown jewel of the evolution so far. Further, following the same mysterious force that unites all things throughout the process, these thoughts don't live alone by themselves, but form a connected world of consciousness that de Chardin dubbed "noosphere" (from the Greek word "nous" that means "mind"), and continue to evolve towards a maximum level of complexity called "Omega Point" that he believed is the ultimate goal of the cosmic evolution.

Carl Jung (1875-1961), founder of modern day analytical psychology and on par in prestige and achievements with the other psycho-analysis maestro Sigmund Freud, also believed in the existence of universal consciousness, and hidden elements of human unconsciousness he called "archetypes", which are the accumulated patterns and forms of the collective human psyche inherited from the past.

Have you ever experienced some fleeting images of some places and times that you know you have never been to but feel like you have lived there before, like in your previous lives?

If the universal consciousness and collective human mind do exist, modern day information technologies help spread and cultivate them at micro-electronic speeds that's never been seen before. Besides "going viral", another bio-infected term "meme" (pronounced "meem", from an ancient Greek word meaning "imitate") is now used to describe the essence of an idea, behavior, style, or cultural phenomenon that can be transmitted, varied, mutated, duplicated throughout cyber space, just as a gene's DNA does through living bodies. Thus, a street dance in LA posted on YouTube can be instantly seen by kids in Tokyo and mimicked with some adaptation and re-posted, then mimicked and adapted again by another group of people on the streets of London or Paris and re-posted, etc., in a matter of days or weeks. Also, a video clip with a cute cat doing funny things can inspire many "copy-cat" postings of the same theme, thus the popular "cat-meme" phenomenon, that may rage on for months or years.

Or you might say this is just a "varied, mutated" way of saying the good old term "fad" in cyber lingo, a "vernacular meme" by itself, so to speak. 

If the uncovering of collective mind and hidden unconsciousness itself is not fascinating enough, some go even further to allege and try to prove that such metaphysical force fields can and do interact with the physical world we live in. The Global Consciousness Project (GCP), conducted by Princeton University since 1998, uses a distributed network of Random Number Generators to register, compute, and verify if certain dramatic, emotionally-charged world events create anomaly to the supposed randomness of the numbers generated by the machines. The GCP claims that, as of 2009, the cumulative result of 300 events, including those of the September 11, 2001 attacks, does support such hypothesis. In another example, a study conducted during the peak of the Lebanon War in the early 1980's indicated that the more people gathered together to meditate for peace, the better the peace movement seemed to progress (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVFa6Wtuxu8).

Not that these allegations and their supposed proofs are concrete and indisputable already, but the fact that you have read this writing through this point, able to follow the thought and reasoning, even though we may be thousands of miles apart, from different cultural or ethnic backgrounds, these words written hours or days before you see it, proves that we are somehow on some same tracks, that are intelligible, universal, and transcendental. That's amazing enough for me!



"All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything unconnected with any other things. For things have been coordinated, and they combine to make up the same universe. For there is one universe made up of all things, and one god who pervades all things, and one substance, and one law, and one reason."
-- Marcus Aurelius (121-180), Roman Emperor

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