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Probing the Noosphere
The Global Consciousness Project
with GCP founder and director Roger Nelson
 
"The implications of our findings are that we are, in fact, a little bit bigger than we know. We extend not just to thesurface of our fingertips but all the way across the table, and maybe all the way around the world."—Roger Nelson
The Global Consciousness Project, based in Princeton, New Jersey, is a system of EGG(ElectroGaiaGraph) devices whose activity is correlated through the Internet.These EGG machines, which were originally designed to reflect coherent conscious activity,monitor the effect of consciousness data worldwide on a continuous basis in order to detect thepossible emergence of patterns during globally meaningful events.In doing this, the Global Consciousness Project has uncovered, during certain world events, manyinstances of significant deviation from what would be normal, random static.Here, Roger Nelson, the man who conceived and continues to lead and inspire this project, tellsus about what they have proved, what they have not proved, and how he feels we can best usethe project's information to help expand Creative Consciousness in our embattled world.
Q:
What got you interested in global consciousness?
Roger:
I have practically forever thought that we are all interconnected. But the GlobalConsciousness Project itself actually began as a few outlines I made back in college upon
 
encountering the work of Teilhard de Chardin.Chardin was a scientist, a paleontologist, and a Jesuit who wrote a couple of remarkable books,including
Phenomenon of Man 
and
The Future of Man 
, where he talked about human evolutionand asked the question, "Where are we going?"Ultimately, he thought that we were not finished, that there was another level — at least one more — a kind of destiny to acquire layers of intelligence on Earth. He describes this as our "likely nextfuture," a coding of intelligence for all life on Earth. And he called that intelligence coding the"noosphere."Chardin's noosphere is like an atmosphere, or an ionosphere, but it's made out of intelligence.Teilhard was a patient man, and he knew this next level wasn't going to happen the day aftertomorrow. I think he even suggested it might take as long as ten thousand years — although that'snot a long time in terms of Evolution.But although he wrote only fifty years ago, I think we're seeing some beginning signs that whatChardin predicted is happening sooner, including some signs that it
must 
happen sooner or we'rein big trouble. We're rapidly messing up the home that we live in.So I think we're beginning to see a tiny glimmer — the faint, faint, beginnings — of the process offorming a noosphere, and that it's visible in the form I like to think of as Global Consciousness.I think we are actually changing and coming to participate in a giant kind of global analysis, orglobal presence. And I think we do this sometimes without even knowing it.We're like neurons, in a way. Neurons don't know anything about the brain or consciousness, they just know what they need to know in order to get the job done. If there is such a thing as anoosphere, we'll be in the same kind of position as neurons are in. We'll do the best we can to begood humans, just like neurons do the best they can to be good neurons. And the result in justbeing who we are will be a kind of interconnection among humanity that becomes comfortable at agreater level, at a deeper, more profound level, so that the Earth will have what Teilhard called anoosphere.So as to what got me interested in global consciousness and in doing a project like this, I havebeen working toward it for a long time. And in that time, I have learned a great deal about humanconsciousness "at the edges" — what we are capable of; things that most people don't even know
 
how to name.Among those things is what I think of as Creative Consciousness: the idea that when we pray, forexample, it may actually matter in the world.
Q:
How did you first develop the tools you use in the Global Consciousness Project — themachines that detect the presence of singlemindedness among groups — and how did that lead tothe project as it's now conceived?
Roger:
In 1980, after several years as a psychology professor in a small Vermont college, I wentto Princeton, where they were setting up a project to study what they referred to as the "lesserknown aspects of human consciousness" (they didn't want to say parapsychology or psychicresearch).At Princeton, we developed a machine — a tool or a set of tools — that could be used to capturesome aspects of consciousness directly. Not fingers manipulating buttons, but the direct influenceof consciousness on what's around it.We took that technology out in the field — to meetings, church services, rituals of all kinds — Ieven took it to Egypt, to sacred places like Karnak's temple. And the instrument worked. It couldsee something different when people came together and became a group consciousness — whenthey sacrificed a little individuality in order to participate in something larger, something thatcomprised the whole group.Then, around the year 1996, I started to wonder just how big that group could be.Of course the natural Big Group is the entire population of the Earth. And just at the time I wasthinking this, about using our technology to measure Global Consciousness, I met a couple ofbeautiful people who were promoting a kind of global meditation called Gaia Mind Meditation.We didn't have a network at the time, but I called or emailed my friends and said, "When the nextGaia Mind Meditation takes place, let's get some data."And it worked out just as we'd hoped. We saw a significant change in the way the data lookedduring the time that this broad-spectrum coalition had decided to meditate and think about Gaia forfive minutes on a certain day.This happened in January 1997. And it led, as a kind of prototype, to doing the same thing the
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