Generally, a decision is considered conscious if it has your full deliberation and attention. Being conscious is synonymous with being aware of your own surroundings. But, everyone has their own vision and perception, making everyone’s conscious effort or conscious decision different from everyone else. In this context, the socially accepted etiquette comes handy to maintain order and organically steers all of us in the practice of a linear thought process. Per psychological evidence, most of our vision and perception is developed in our childhood. Childhood is when we learn the good from bad, black from white. It is when we are literally taught to understand the linearity in the historical, current and expected futuristic intention of humans, in their group setting sorted via religion, sex, color, caste, location, occupation, social media trends and educational achievements. Most of us have grown up building our perception of black and white as we learn from education and society, but also from our own experiences. But, before we are conditioned into society, when we are born and don’t even understand the so-called practicality of life, what do we carry as our earliest consciousness into this world? — our inherited genes, and that forms the core of the common global consciousness.
Our genes are so important, that it can be accepted that World War II was an effort by Hitler to make the ‘Aryan” gene thrive over others which he thought were inferior. To put things into the current perspective, In 2009, U.S. senate passed an act which prohibits any organization to use genetic information for any kind of employee discrimination. This act is a reflection of the advancements in gene research and technology. For example, CRISPR is a biomedical organization operating in Europe and U.S., that claims to have the technology to be able to edit DNA strands in humans successfully. This means removing the DNA that carries the gene that is causing a serious disease in your family generations after generations, and letting the DNA repair itself. Currently, it is experimental, expensive and partially supported by Government Health Authorities. But, genes, in general, is what we bring into the world before anything else in this world affects our life. Carl Jung, a Psychiatrist in the era of non-evidence based theoretical and observation based diagnosis, talked about a “collective unconscious”, which in his perception and observation meant — the human traits that connect us with our earliest ancestors. He believed that all of us humans have this “collective unconscious” as our basic psyche. These traits are not affected or created by personal experiences. When one thinks about the gene inherited traits now, with the availability of evidence based data, it can very well be put into synonymy with Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’ theory. This huge pool of DNA engraved information, that we partially understand yet, is what we have inherited over generations of our evolution.
Global Consciousness, is a parapsychology experiment that began in 1998. It is an international-multidisciplinary effort of scientists and engineers who are gathering ‘randomly’ generated responses from different parts of the world to the ongoing events. Their goal is to investigate the subtle correlations that represent the presence of consciousness of the population of the world as a whole. In simpler words, it detects random, (and not triggered) responses or reactions of people across 60 different countries to the current events, and then examines them to identify the ones that carry similar intentions that deviate from the normal behavior of the responses. This creates an image of a pure ‘global consciousness’ that is unbiased or original. The utmost requirement here is to make sure that the reactions are unbiased, which by the knowledge that the probability of the response being random or unbiased is one in a billion, makes this project inefficient even with its 10 years of collected data examinations. But what it proves is the subtle existence of a certain collective fight or flight behavior. In my own perspective, this project is essentially supporting Carl Jung’s ‘global unconscious’ theory, whose synonymy with the information imparted within us by our genes is subtly apparent. Since from an evolutionary perspective, our genes should all be originally coming from the same source, we should all be capable of some subtle but extraordinary feats of survival owing to the inherited genes. If this is true, the Global Consciousness project should be receiving loads of unbiased data as deviation due to a strong ‘global unconscious’ in Jung’s words. But we know from the data that is not the case! So, what is stopping us from unleashing the power of these primal survival genes? I feel part of it is shadowed by the social conditioning and basing all of our knowledge and growth on linear or sequential thought processes. Although linear thinking, also called logical and intelligent sometimes, is actually proven to be detrimental in the long term; it is still taught in many schools around the world as the logical way to think. Linearity is how we are taught to create order in our minds. When a process has a start and an end, we are able to easily store it in our brains. But is it the only way to know that a process is efficient? The way organizations handle project management currently is in direct contradiction with the childhood conditioning of linear thinking. Just citing the example of Agile, that uses Horizontal (or Lateral) approach to a process rather than Vertical (or Linear) approach, handles change management so efficiently that it is practiced most widely, as cited by Forbes. The most practiced method created from the Agile philosophy is Scrum, that uses an iterative and dynamically change-efficient environment that uses the Horizontal or Lateral thinking approach.
Lateral thinking is the ability to create and resolve more efficiently without sequential logic, but rather using a multi-disciplinary abstract method with the relevant meta-data connecting the core of each segment of this method, and creating or resolving with the removal of the inadequacy of a linear thought to involve the alternatives in its approach. The social etiquette of following the sequence in any creation or resolve, and not understanding the essence of the intention behind it makes our brain grasp everything linearly, I feel. But it is also the chaos or noise created by our physical existence as humans that blocks the lateral thinking neural pathways in our brain. Whenever we feel overwhelmed with the quantity and depth of information thrown at us, we have to remember that this is because we never trained our brain to connect abstract information to new information as it is received. An example is a movie called “Arrival” by Denis Villeneuve that was based on a short story in a book called “the story of your life and others” by Ted Chiang. This story revolves around aliens that visit our planet and try to communicate with their unique language. With the help of a linguist, it is revealed that their language is not linear, and that empowers them to defy the linearity of time itself. Although this is a fictional story, but let us think about the facts used in the story that are true to us -
- In human approach, time is linear.
- Our languages, both spoken and written, follow a linear order called the “Word Order”. Although the order could be different in terms of what comes first — Subject, Verb or Object, but it remains linear for easier and better communication.
I feel we are what we say, and ultimately do. Since whatever we say or do is defined by our language and time, we have created a linearity bias for ourselves, to simplify our lives. I understand that this simplification helps us understand each other more easily, but practical approaches like Agile instigate a thought of being non-linearly or laterally efficient in our thought and action. As a blast from the past, I feel this is also the reason why Nikola Tesla’s vision of alternating currents which cannot be visualized in a linear or sequential way experienced significant rebellia from average common folk, but was ultimately accepted because it worked physically, and is used by the whole world.
We can agree at this point that most of us are following a linear approach to intention, thought and action in our lives. But, the amount of core technological advancement that has happened is constantly becoming beyond the understanding of an average human being. I feel the linear approach to life that we have built in our daily life routine needs an update. We need to be building more processes like Agile for the next generations to be practiced in routine lives as well. We need to create new academic processes to steadily move away from the linear way of life.
I feel Global consciousness empowers all of us to react in a way that our ancestors with higher knowledge would. But there is so much self-generated noise for us humans that we cannot even feel the effect of it anymore. So, whenever you feel randomly connected to a certain worldly event that has no personal or even subjective connection to you, feel that thought intently, because that might be the one in a billion chance of experiencing global consciousness organically.
