Reiki School Day 25: The Collective ElectroMagnetic Field of the Earth and us

If you feel like reading more about how you and the collective interact with a bit more science experiments:

“Roger Nelson, an experimental psychologist with a background in physics and statistical methods, who was also the operations coordinator at PEAR, created the Global Consciousness Project (GCP). This is an international project that expands upon the work of PEAR, though it functions independently of it. The group has installed a network of REGs around the world—from France to New Zealand to Kenya to New York—all of which send data continuously to a server in Princeton, New Jersey. These machines are a bit like electrodes, as Nelson describes it, “taking the EEG of the planet.”

Ultimately, the GCP seeks to measure the effects of the global collective consciousness.

To do so, researchers examine the data from the machines at the time of riveting world events, ranging in variety from New Year’s Eve to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti to Donald Trump’s 2016 inauguration. “We are looking at times when groups of people became resonant with each other,” Nelson explains. “We identify an occurrence that we think represents a moment in time when people really came together and shared emotions in “a profound way”—and then create a statistical analysis of the information streaming from the machines during that time.

Specifically, they determine the mean output from the various REGs scattered about the world, determining whether the numbers adhere to a baseline, or if they increase or decrease. The formal measure looks at pair-wise correlations. They compare the data from the New York REG with every other machine in the network, for example—to see if there is any correlation within pairs. Statistically, there shouldn’t be a correlation at all beyond a very small variation above or below zero. But the GCP has found that many of these events have incurred parallels between information coming from different machines.

On New Year’s Eve, for example, they have discovered the data, if mapped, reliably creates a V-shaped curve, with midnight represented by the bottom point of the V.

That is, the machines tend to correlate during the worldwide rise in excitement leading up to midnight and then again as the tension dissipates just after midnight.

“Nobody has a fully adequate theory for why this happens,” Nelson acknowledges. “But I think we each have our individual consciousness . . . We imagine it is in our heads, maybe in the brain—but the experience of thousands of years and recent scientific empirical evidence indicates that the mind extends out into the world. Consciousness is not a confined unity or entity stuck inside the skin and bone; it is much more expansive.

“The GCP also analyzes their findings by categories, breaking the events down by size and whether the event elicited positive or negative emotions. Compassion, Nelson notes, seems to be one of the strongest determinants for correlation. “It is an emotion that does connect us—and we find events that evoke compassion yield larger data deviations,” he explains. “But fear is also quite strong. I wish I could say fear doesn’t do anything but it, too, causes a kind of interconnection.”

Sometimes the two emotions are intertwined, as with 9/11. The GCP found their numbers showed a sharp variation during this crisis, although the trend started about four or five hours before the first plane hit and lasted for three days afterward. Though Nelson makes clear that it is not a scientific conclusion, he interprets this early statistical deviation as a collective premonition and the sustained shift afterward as a reflection of the world’s continuing intense emotions.

“Critics, however, point to this as an example of the unreliability of the results and a bias toward retrofitting them with an explanation. Whatever the case may be, the statistical deviations during the formal database of five hundred specified world events are calculated by the GCP to be one-in-a-trillion odds that they could happen only by chance.”

“We’re a little like neurons. There are one hundred billion neurons in the human brain. When they do their job, the result is an incredibly unexpected new thing we experience as consciousness and reflection and emotion,” Nelson says. “Soon there will be ten billion people in the world; we are designed to be interconnected. And there is a potential awakening for us, to reach a more unified field of consciousness, to create a layer of intelligence for the earth. I think it’s important that we acknowledge that we are interconnected in some way, to accept that and learn from it.”

Though it’s not yet possible to wholly explain the effects of energy medicine through the lens of science—the healing relationship contains intangible elements that will always remain mysterious—it is clear to me that the practice obeys the laws of “physics in significant ways.

Practically speaking, we are all connected through our electromagnetic fields, be it of our whole bodies or those of our brains or our hearts, but I believe—as the work of Dr. Gary Schwartz, the HeartMath Institute, and the PEAR lab also suggest—that we are able to affect one another with our energy fields. We are, in this way, creating a communal movement that, as the Global Consciousness Project is seeking to measure, ebbs and flows on a tide of collective emotion. Like Einstein’s “spooky actions at a distance,” we are connected in ways that can be glimpsed, and even partially explained, through science. The mystery remains largely in the universal energy field—what Chinese philosophy calls the Tao and quantum physics calls the zero point field—which I believe is intelligent. This larger energy field is interacting with us at all times; we are in a kind of conversation with it.”

“It has a degree of governance over our lives, but we can also influence it with our thoughts and actions. Recent scientific research is offering a glimpse of a phenomenon religious people have taken on faith, that there is an unseen force that we experience, and can be altered by, whether we are conscious of it or not.”

Research suggests that healers adapt their physiology in order to heal. In my case, as Dr. Lagos discovered, the frequencies of my brain and heart begin to resonate. Further research has shown that patients then mirror the healer and as their frequencies align a resonant bond is created. This bond seems to be the optimal connection for the transfer of energetic information. The first stage of this process is to practice a breathing technique that encourages internal resonance.

Here is the exercise Dr. Lagos gives her patients. It’s simple but effective.

The optimal breathing rate to create the most heart rate variability is five breaths per minute. This means that each inhale and exhale lasts six seconds.

Practice breathing in gently for a count of six and then breathing out smoothly, also for a count of six. Don’t force it. The goal here is to balance your sympathetic nervous system—the one responsible for your fight-or-flight response—with your parasympathetic nervous system, which slows your heart rate down. For the same reason, I recommend that you don’t count aloud or use a visual cue (such as an app) to keep track of your breaths, as it could mildly activate your sympathetic nervous system.”

Isn't this fascinating?