The Role Of Consciousness In The New Global Paradigm

by Adrian D. Nelson

These days a lot of people talk about a ‘new paradigm.’ Today there are paradigm shifts taking place everywhere, from ecology, economics and health, to physics and cosmology. For many, however, when we’re talking about the new paradigm, we’re talking about something bigger: an approaching shift in thinking that, when realized, will constitute a deep collective change in the way we see our place in the universe.

This spring I attended the Architects of the New Paradigm conference in Northern California, where a diverse cast of speakers spoke truth to power on a range of issues, from new energy solutions to the disclosure of government secrets. I think, perhaps, of all these ongoing ‘revolutions’ in our perception, the most profound of these rests with the nature of perception itself.

That is, new theories and evidence arriving from modern research suggest that the heart of our experiencing self — the unique natural phenomenon we have called ‘consciousness,’ is more than an incidental emergence in the human animal; it reflects something fundamental about the way reality is organized.

In science and philosophy a movement is now taking place; a growing openness toward deeper views of mind. There are a range of reasons why, including discoveries in physics, yet perhaps the driving factor in recent decades has been a widening recognition of the difficulty of explaining consciousness in purely material terms. As a psychologist and journalist, I’ve followed this movement to places I never expected to find myself. In delving into the research of scientists like Dean Radin, Robert Jahn, and Rupert Sheldrake, I learned that at least some categories of psychic phenomena actually occur — and under rigorously controlled conditions.

Over nearly three decades, experiments conducted by researchers at Princeton University revealed that when people direct their intention to a physical random system, the outputs will often shift in line with their intentions. Outside any ordinary physical contact, the reported effect seems impossible to reconcile within a materialist understanding of the mind.(1)

Other research exploring mind-matter interaction found that a network of random event generators (also called ‘maximum entropy systems’) located all around the planet mysteriously respond to collective shifts in attention of entire populations. The Global Consciousness Project, led by psychologist Roger Nelson, found that when dramatic world events occur, and millions of minds respond with similar emotions, strange patterns of order emerge in the data. Where attention goes, order mysteriously flows.(2)

[More…]

Philosophers stone – selected views from the boat http://philosophers-stone.co.uk