key: cord-0703374-c8lq3f82
authors: Dossey, Larry
title: Mother Nature Speaks: Coronavirus, Connectedness, and Consciousness
date: 2020-08-29
journal: Explore (NY)
DOI: 10.1016/j.explore.2020.08.008
sha: eb9bea20fb00e14a4a61eafcaadb1f29620b6b4e
doc_id: 703374
cord_uid: c8lq3f82

nan

• "There is one common flow, one common breathing….

All things are in sympathy." 1 Hippocrates, De Alimento, fifth century BCE • As I write in late July 2020, there have been almost 5,000,000 confirmed cases and nearly 155,000 deaths in the United States attributed to the coronavirus pandemic. 2 These statistics continue to increase as the virus now ravages rural areas as well as large cities. No region of the country is immune to this scourge.

In an April report called We Are All In This Together, António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, declared, "The COVID-19 pandemic is a public health emergency -but it is far more…. It has reinforced the need for solidarity more strongly than ever. We belong to each other. We stand together, or we fall apart." 3 Since the Secretary-General announced "We're all in this together," this has become a popular slogan around the world, and rightly so. It points the need for global cooperation between vast numbers of individuals in the face of planetary adversity. But this motto is more than that. The deeper message is that human consciousness is unitary, collective, and one. This realization is hardly new, as the epigraph by Hippocrates reveals.

But we have not listened and taken this ancient message to heart. We have plundered our planet. We continue to behave as selfish individuals disconnected from a larger whole. Individual greed and acquisitiveness have led us to disregard the Earth's environmental integrity and it's interlocking connectness. Some authorities suggest that the coronavirus emerged as a result of profound humancaused environmental disturbances, and that additional pandemics may lie ahead. As Peter Daszak, the British zoologist, expert on disease ecology, and president of EcoHealth Alliance states in The Guardian, "Before humans became an agricultural species, our populations were sparser and less connected. A virus infecting a hunter-gatherer might only reach family members or perhaps a hunting group. But the Anthropocene, our new geological epoch, has changed everything. A great acceleration of human activity has dramatically altered our planet's landscapes, oceans and atmosphere, transforming as much as half of the world's tropical forest into agriculture and human settlements." 4

Mother Nature appears to be running out of patience with us. I imagine she is saying to us, "I presented you a world of elegant harmony that included your own consciousness. I provided you scientific proofs that human consciousness is unitary and nonlocally infinite in space and time. You turned away and paid no attention. So now I'm upping the ante: I'm sending a lethal virus to remind you of the unitary nature of your consciousness and its inseparability with the natural world. Perhaps these life-and-death conditions will shock you into an awakening. Under social lockdown and isolation, perhaps you will rediscover your capacity to communicate beyond the reach of your senses. Can you wake up to the connectedness and unity of your consciousness, the miracle that makes you quintessentially human?"

Let's be honest about the seriousness of the coronavirus challenge. Instead of discovering we're all in this together, we may fall apart. As the late biologist Lyall Watson wrote three decades ago, "[H]uman beings…go to pieces rather rapidly in solitary confinement." But Watson realized that a greater understanding can come from solitude: "But it seems that, in a very real sense, we are never completely alone. There are strange tendrils that reach out, apparently quite independent of time and space, to touch us all, giving us a common experience of reality." 5 Do "strange tendrils reach out," as Watson claimed? According to conventional neuroscience there is no such thing. Cognition and mentation, we are told, are mediated by the physical senses and are the result of complex biochemical reactions in individual brains and bodies. Only in someone's fevered imagination can physical functions "reach out" independent of time and space.

"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order." 6 ~ Carl Jung

How, then, to explain the findings of the Global Consciousness Project that have emerged from Roger D. Nelson's work that originated at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory? Over many years, the global awareness of certain events by millions of individuals is correlated with the reversion of random number generators to a nonrandom function shortly before the event in question actually unfolds. An example is the Nine-Eleven tragedy in New York City, which shocked the entire world. Nelson describes numerous additional events in his recent book Connected: The Emergence of Global Consciousness. 7 He states, "I think the data are pretty much indisputably in support of that we do interconnect, we interact, we're not isolated. My consciousness, inside my skull, and yours, extend out into the world, and they intermix. We're a little like neurons, in a giant brain, that we know nothing about." 8 The unconscious awareness of impending events has been meticulously explored by researchers in studies known as presentiment experiments. In these computer-controlled tests, a test subject registers bodily changes in an autonomic function, such as the electrical conductivity of the skin, a few seconds before a computer randomly displays an emotionally upsetting or sexually titillating image.

In these experiments it appears that the materialists are wrong: our minds can reach out, independent of space and time, in anticipation of future events that have not yet happened. 9, 10 These experimental findings are no surprise to researchers in parapsychology, where they have been observed for over a century. These results overwhelming demonstrate the reality of precognition, the knowledge of future events. This ability is also affirmed in the field of remote viewing, pioneered by researchers Stephan A. Schwartz, 11 Harold Puthoff, Russell Targ 12 and others. In these studies, individuals are aware of events that are remote in space and time.

What image of consciousness can accommodate these findings -the computer-based presentiment discoveries, the longstanding record of psi research, random event generators that predict global events before they occur, and remote viewing experiments? Many candidate theories have been offered. While they differ in details, they have common traits. They imply, for instance, that a mind does not have conventional boundaries; it is not limited to an individual brain and body. Minds are unruly; they don't stay put; they wander all over the place in space and time; they are unconfined and unconfinable. Like it or not, we're all potentially mentally connected. So the central message surfacing in our coronavirus era -"We are all in this together" -is correct, confirmed by experimental data from a variety of sources.

This key message is erupting everywhere. On Reddit, the social media link, people post dreams and intuitions about the coronavirus invasion that occurred before the pandemic happened. Skeptical materialists maintain that these precognitive intimations are simply nonsense, nothing more than backward reasoning, lies, or chance occurrences. You decide. Go to the "coronavirus dreams" site on Reddit. While you're at it, visit also the numerous websites featuring "dreams of nine-eleven," where you'll see the same phenomena. Or take a dive into the parapsychology research literature, and you'll discover that a common stimulus to premonitory dreams is a threat to personal safety, a feature which these links share.

This leads to tantalizing questions. Can dreams and intuitions reveal impending planetary threats? Can individuals identify viral pandemics before they occur? Can we identify individuals who are talented dreamers who, as a "dream team," might dream for the common good?

Our underlying unity with one another and the natural world can suddenly burst into one's awareness as a revelation or epiphany. Here's what happened to the contemporary Swedish psychologist and spiritual teacher Dhyan Giten following a Sunday walk outdoors:

Suddenly I was one with everything, one with the stones, one with the trees and one with the people that I meet on my walk…. My heart danced with joy together with a feeling of: "I am God". Not that I am the creator of everything, but that I am part of the Whole, part of the divine. It felt like coming home, that Existence is my home. I also saw that even if the people that I meet did not understand that they are a part of the Whole, they still are a part of the Whole. I felt the waves of Existence in my own heart and being and I felt like a small wave in a great ocean. It gave a taste of the eternal, a taste of the limitless and boundless source of creativity. In just a few moments, I learnt more than during 20 years in university. …Wisdom is basically the understanding that we all are part of the Whole. We are all small rivers moving towards the ocean. I laughed at the fact that enlightenment is really our innate birthright, and that small children already live in this mystical unity with the Whole. 13

Many statements affirming our connectedness surfaced during the late 20 th century. Examples: "You can't put it together. It is together." And, "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature." And who can forget Stewart Brand's The Whole Earth Catalog, published in 1969? 14 I've reviewed much of the evidence pointing to our unity in my book One Mind: How Our Individual Mind is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters. 15 In spite of abundant evidence, we Americans have largely ignored our interlocked relationships with one another and the Earth itself. The world has noticed. Our country has recently become a pariah among many of the world's nations. Concerned for their own safety, they have barred American citizens from entering because of the way we've mishandled Covid-19. We're failing in other ways as well. Even though warnings of global warming are more urgent than ever before, America's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement to stem global warming has added to our renegade reputation. 16

In the meantime I continue to imagine what Mother Nature may be thinking: "I'll give these humans another chance to honor their unifying connections. I'll send not the plagues of old, which were too deadly (I over-did it), but something new that might stimulate fresh thinking on their part. I'll deliver a novel microbe that causes them to socially isolate and disengage from one another. Forced isolation and distancing just may prompt them to engage in ancient forms of communication they've forgotten. Perhaps they will realize that the nonlocal nature of their own minds -apart yet together -makes possible international cooperation in defeating the virus. And that their innate ability to transcend distance and time represents the immortality and eternality of their consciousness. Perhaps. A mother can only hope!" ~ Larry Dossey, MD Executive Editor

together-human-rights-and-covid-19-response-and-recovery-video-message-thesecretary-general-delivered

We are entering an era of pandemics -it will end only when we protect the rainforest

Connected: The Emergence of Global Consciousness

Kiger PJ. 9/11 and Global Consciousness

Unconscious perception of future emotions: an experiment in presentiment

Further investigation of unconscious differential anticipatory responses to future emotions. Proceeding of the 40th Annual Convention of the the Parapsychological Association

Opening to the Infinite: The Art and Science of Nonlocal Awareness

Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding

Whole Earth Catalog