Volume 6, Issue 2 , Pages 71-74, March 2010
Trends That Will Affect Your Future …
Nonlocal Linkage and the Social Dimension
Article Outline
The SchwartzReport tracks emerging trends that will affect the world, particularly the United States. For EXPLORE, it focuses on matters of health in the broadest sense of that term, including medical issues, changes in the biosphere, technology, and policy considerations, all of which will shape our culture and our lives.
Do you sense the schism occurring in the United States? Not the red and blue of politics, although that comes into it. Something deeper, a shift that is producing two very different reactions. Can you feel the ground moving? The zeitgeist of one population is grounded in fear, resentment, anger, and a sense of loss. It is theologically conservative, politically rigid, and exclusionist. The other population holds a sober realization that great change is coming, but also the sense that it offers at least the putative opportunity to create a more stable life-affirming culture. It is theologically and politically accommodating, and inclusionist.
We all have a vested interest in this schism and the struggle it has produced, not only because through our choices we are its source, but because we will live with the consequences of the decisions made over the next few years. What is particularly concerning is the obsession amongst the population driven by fear with willful ignorance. Yet it cannot be denied that this is an essential attribute of its world view. Only by denying a fact-based world can this perspective be maintained. Most of human history can be seen as a striving for deeper understanding. Science is the highest manifestation of this impulse, perhaps because it is the most objective manifestation. Yet now in the 21st century, we see its antipode emerge—a deep denial of science and the fact-based view of the world. Science, from this perspective, is just another political position, competing in the marketplace of ideas as a political theory.
In 2005, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life carried out a poll involving 2,000 adults, which gives us some real data on what willful ignorance means. They reported 42% of the public believed that “humans and other living things had existed in their present form since the beginning of time,” and that this rose to 70% amongst white evangelical Protestants and decreased to 32% in mainline Protestant churches, and—surprising to some, perhaps—to 31% amongst white Catholics.1 By 2006, the creationist position was affirmed by 55% of Americans.1 Think for a moment about what this means: more than half of America has discarded much of the hard won knowledge of the past 500 years—essentially, the age of modern science and medicine. Astrophysics. Gone. Astronomy. Gone. Paleontology. Gone. Geology. Gone. Biology. Mostly gone. Genetics. Gone. The general laws of physics such as the speed of light found to be defective. It is impossible to believe that the Earth is 10,000 years old, that God manufactured it in six days, and that dinosaurs and humans once coinhabited the planet, and accept that any of those disciplines has anything valid to say. What many would think of as the crown jewels of the human intellect—part of what makes it possible to be optimistic about humanity—are of little or no interest. Because, from the view on this side of the schism, these scientific disciplines cannot be valid. The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, with its dioramas of dinosaurs and people happily coexisting, is the creationist statement of reality.
And as the consort of this self-imposed ignorance, there is a strong premillennial dispensationalist apocalyptic element. End of the world movements in American society are nothing new, but this is the first time in my lifetime significant numbers of the political elite actively entertain the idea of end-times or believe the world is less than 10,000 years old. People are always crying up the end of the world, but you don't expect to see your senator or president espousing such views, or public policy written and enacted on the basis of an information-free values perspective.
The possibilities of climate change do not permit this indulgence. Yet the ever-intensifying split in our society becomes more intense every year, and all middle ground disappears. We need to understand why this fear is so powerful that it trumps even self-preservation. From what does this fear arise, and why is it so powerful? The answers are usually couched in political or religious terms, but they are never satisfying.
I want to suggest another factor. To really understand why half of our population is invested in something which, to the other half, seems almost bizarre, I think we have to talk sensibly about the nonlocal, that aspect of consciousness that experimental evidence shows to be in a domain in which space and time have very different meanings. There are literally thousands of papers published in peer-reviewed journals—even though it sometimes took bitter scholarly struggle to make that publication happen—to build this case. I encourage anyone who would like to go into greater detail to visit the “papers” section of my personal website http://www.stephanaschwartz.com/home.htm for bibliographies on Remote Viewing, Therapeutic Intention, and Meditation. There are other research bibliographies one could present as well. I advance this social model because it has been repeatedly demonstrated from various perspectives in a variety of disciplines as reported in these papers.
I want to get past the usual circular debate of skeptic and proponent call and response because it is clouding something very important: the social implications of nonlocal linkage. It is here we must go to understand the genesis of our schism.
Here following, I think, is what can reasonably be said.
The Interdependent Interconnected Nonlocal Consciousness Model
Here following is what I think can reasonably be said of the Interdependent Interconnected Nonlocal Consciousness Model based on the experimental data: (1) Only certain aspects of the mind are the result of physiologic processes. (2) Consciousness is causal, and physical reality is its manifestation. (3) All consciousnesses, regardless of their physical manifestations, are part of a network of life which they both inform and influence, and are informed and influenced by—there is a passage back and forth between the individual local and the collective nonlocal. (4) Some aspects of consciousness are not limited by space time.
If space and time are not controlling factors, what can be used to navigate in the nonlocal domain? I believe the research shows us three:
By intention, I mean focused awareness directed to a goal. Put another way, by intentioned awareness I mean the difference between looking and seeing.
By numinosity, I mean something entirely nonlocal. The reiterated acts of intentioned awareness create, in the nonlocal domain, an architecture of information. It has no physical characteristics. The term numinous, from which I derive numinosity, is based on the Latin word numen, and was coined in 1917 by the eminent German protestant philosopher and theologian Rudolf Otto (1869-1937).2
But Carl Jung was the first in modern science to capture the essence of the concept, saying:
We should not be in the least surprised if the empirical manifestations of unconscious contents bear all the marks of something illimitable, something not determined by space time. This quality is numinous
…. numina are psychic entia…3
There is an aspect of coherence in numinosity. That it increases in intensity through individual acts of intentioned awareness is one of many demonstrations that all consciousness is interconnected. It is, after all, the process by which archetypes are created. The hero of a thousand faces is but one of the nonlocal domain's calling cards. And I think it can be said that the intensity of the nonlocal informational architecture increases with each act of intentioned awareness.
Entropic process is the third attribute of the nonlocal that I think can be supported by well-grounded evidence. In the nonlocal, where there is no space time except as information, entropy means the dissolution of the one informational architecture, and its transformation into another architecture. The transition can be anything from death to a nuclear explosion; it is all ultimately information in the nonlocal.
Below our conscious, awareness research tells us we have a physiological presentiment response to numinous events such a unexpected loud noises,4 or emotionally powerful images,5 both demonstrating our connection to the nonlocal. People know when they are being stared at; their brains respond before they are consciously aware.6 Animals know when their masters are coming home.7 Plants respond when people think about hurting them.8 Life is connected. If we are all linked and have access to the nonlocal aspect of our consciousness whether we are conscious of it or not—mostly not except for what we call hunches, a woman's intuition, or a gut feeling—then we must consider not just its individual attributes, which is what most research focuses on, but its social implications as well.
There is no time in the linear sense in the nonlocal, so the “when” of events is not what matters. In remote viewing, we know it is as easy for an individual to see something in the future, particularly the short-term future, as it is in present time, or past time. We also have evidence that the therapeutic intention linkage is not affected by either space or time. What matters is the numinous intensity of the target, whether it is a thing, a person, a locale, or a social process.
So consider this: the 2012 Mayan calendar predictions, and other ethnohistoric apocalyptic predictions, are presentiments. In the nonlocal domain, a tipping point—that historical moment when some massive entropic process is effected, such as the shift in the earth's biosphere to a new climatic destiny—bringing change, death, fear, and disruption would be an extremely numinous target. Roger Nelson's Global Consciousness Project, which reports changes in randomness amongst remote event generators when massively numinous moments such as the death of Princess Diana occurred, may be pointing out the perturbation of mass linkage.9
How much stronger and more enduring then would be the manifestation of the events described in the projections seen in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the interactive maps of the Arizona State Geosciences Department, or a hundred other laboratories and research stations around the world. If what has been seen in the laboratory is extended, individual experience by individual experience, to a collective social awareness, the precognition of climate change, a massive (highly numinous) transition (entropic process) affecting all life, particularly the lives of those we love (producing a focused intention) must be unnerving at an individual level and deeply disturbing at the social level. And how strongly, one might ask, do they reinforce minds already disposed to apocalyptic end times?
This research, I think, is telling us that the fear arises from the presentiment of the future defined by climate change. We are each of us seismometers of the nonlocal, and our behavior is governed for good or ill in part by our response to this psychic wind. Those whose response is fear will become more and more agitated, more susceptible to manipulation, more irrational and centered on emotion. And more dangerous. Flight or fight at the social, the cultural, level is literally murderous. Every war being fought has as its basis some kind of fear.
Those whose response is to see opportunity come to comprehend that on the other side of the petroleum/nuclear age lies a world based on different rules. It only requires the capacity to be supple and to adapt. In the world of climate change, the only remediation is to change those behaviors that are creating the problem—or die. And, as with the rest of my argument, we can turn to research to guide us. As Science Daily reported, “In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive.”10
Psychologist Dacher Keltner, codirector of UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center and author of Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life explains it this way:
Because of our very vulnerable offspring, the fundamental task for human survival and gene replication is to take care of others. Human beings have survived as a species because we have evolved the capacities to care for those in need and to cooperate. As Darwin long ago surmised, sympathy is our strongest instinct.4
Other research tells us that compassionate life-affirming choices create happiness and that happiness is contagious. Nicholas A. Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard University who has studied this exact issue says, “You would think that your emotional state would depend on your own choices and actions and experience, but it also depends on the choices and actions and experiences of other people, including people to whom you are not directly connected. Happiness is contagious.”11 In the study, 4,700 people were followed over two decades. Like all good longitudinal studies, those years mellowed the research data like a good wine, giving it gravitas. Christakis and his colleagues discovered that if you are happy or become happy you increase the probability that someone you know will be happy just through a casual interaction with you. Even more surprising, the Harvard researchers found that this capacity to create happiness could extend to third degree of separation. It even translates into real world economics. “Our work shows that whether a friend's friend is happy has more influence than a $5,000 raise,” says Christakis.4
Clusters of happy and unhappy people are visible in the network, and the relationship between people's happiness extends up to three degrees of separation (for example, to the friends of one's friends' friends). People who are surrounded by many happy people and those who are central in the network are more likely to become happy in the future. Longitudinal statistical models suggest that clusters of happiness result from the spread of happiness and not just a tendency for people to associate with similar individuals. A friend who lives within a mile (about 1.6 km) and who becomes happy increases the probability that a person is happy by 25% (95% confidence interval 1% to 57%). Similar effects are seen in coresident spouses (8%, 0.2% to 16%), siblings who live within a mile (14%, 1% to 28%), and next door neighbours (34%, 7% to 70%). Effects are not seen between coworkers. The effect decays with time and with geographical separation.12
Psychologist Martin E.P. Seligman, of the University of Pennsylvania, commenting on this work, made as clear a statement of the nonlocal linkage process in the social context as any I could make—although he may not see it in quite the same way—saying, “Laughter and singing and smiling tune the group emotionally. They get them on the same wavelength so they can work together more effectively as group.” I would only add that ritual ceremony using music or dance is the technique of choice the world over for creating nonlocal linked shared intention.
And just how big a network of shared intention does it take to create life-affirming change, instead of succumbing to fear? I think we have data on this as well. There are today less than 250,000 Quakers in the three Quaker groups in the United States.13 Such a small group that most Americans have never met one, and never will. Yet when you wind back every socially progressive transition in our history—abolition, penal reform, public education, women's suffrage, civil rights, nuclear freeze, and environmental concerns—you find a small group of Quakers. As I write this, there are a little more than 308 million people in the United States. So Quakers constitute 0.00081136% of the population. Pretty small. I find that quite comforting. It means we don't have to get everyone on the side of the life affirming.
We are going to go through some measure of climate change, whatever we do. We will survive 2012, although it seems to me that what is coming is something so numinous that it has resonated back to the Maya, so it will not be minor. In the nonlocal domain, there is no time, only numinosity and the entropic process it so often flows from. Climate change is the most numinous entropic process one can imagine, and the fullness of its impact lies far in the future. Fear is something we must learn to live with, just as the English lived with fear during the blitz. We won't serve ourselves through denial, and how bad this will be will in some measure be based on the choices we make. How subtle and adaptive we are, how quickly we learn the rules of working with the biosphere. We are all linked, and compassionate life-affirming choices will tip the balance in favor of survival and evolution.
These are choices each of us will have to make day by day.
References
- Religion a strength and weakness for both parties (The Pew Research for the People and the Press). http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=254August 30 2005;Accessed April 14, 2008
- . The Idea of the Holy. Harvey JW, trans Oxford, England: Oxford University Press; 1958;
- . Dreams II. Hull RFC, trans Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 1974;
- . Anomalous anticipatory skin conductance response to acoustic stimuli: experimental results and speculation upon a mechanism. J Altern Complement Med. 2005;11:695–702
- . Intuition through time: what does the seer see?. Explore (NY). 2009;5:200–211
- . Distant Mental Influence (Studies in Consciousness). In: Targ R editors. Charlottesville, NC: Hampton Roads; 2003;
- . Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home: And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals. New York, NY: Crown; 1999;
- . Primary perception: biocommunication with plants, living foods, and human cells. Anza, Calif: White Rose Millennium Press; 2003;
- Meaningful correlations in random data (Global Consciousness Project). http://noosphere.princeton.edu/Accessed December 8, 2009
- Social scientists build case for ‘survival of the kindest’ (Science Daily). http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091208155309.htmDec. 9, 2009;Accessed December 9, 2009
- . Happiness can spread among people like a contagion, study indicates. Washington Post Web site http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2008/12/04/AR2008120403537.html?hpid=topnewsDecember 5, 2008;Accessed December 5, 2008
- . Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study. BMJ. 2008;4:a2338
- Who Are the Quakers?. Beliefnet.com http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christianity/Protestant/2000/10/Who-Are-The-Quakers.aspxAccessed December 8, 2009
Stephan A. Schwartz is the editor of the daily Web publication The SchwartzReport (http://www.schwartzreport.net), which concentrates on trends that will shape the future, an area of research he has been working in since the mid-1960s. For over 35 years he has also been an active experimentalist doing research on the nature of consciousness, particularly remote viewing, healing, creativity, religious ecstasy, and meditation. He is the author of several books and numerous papers, technical reports, and general audience articles on these topics.
PII: S1550-8307(09)00412-1
doi:10.1016/j.explore.2009.12.007
© 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Volume 6, Issue 2 , Pages 71-74, March 2010
