What is global consciousness? Before answering that question, we need to look at the terms consciousness, collective consciousness, and higher consciousness as they are poorly understood.
Introduction
The terms consciousness, collective consciousness, higher consciousness, and global consciousness are poorly understood and often used casually without much thought, but what do they mean?
What is Consciousness?
Consciousness is subjective. We each experience it differently. It is challenging to define, as seen in this Wikipedia entry or this Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article.
Here is my practical definition:
Tag: consciousness (18)
Breaking this down a little, it’s about being:
- aware of our external world, e.g., through our senses, such as sight and touch
- aware of our physical selves, e.g., pain, tiredness, and hunger
- aware of our internal mental world, e.g., thoughts and feelings such as happiness, sadness, and enthusiasm
- aware of being aware – self-awareness
- responsive to our awareness and having the ability to act on it
Many writers use consciousness as a metaphor for awareness of our external world. However, consciousness is more than this.
You should also note that being responsive to changes in our environment, whether external or internal, is an integral and essential part of being conscious.
Consciousness is everything you experience. It is the tune stuck in your head, the sweetness of chocolate mousse, the throbbing pain of a toothache, the fierce love for your child and the bitter knowledge that eventually all feelings will end.
Explaining Consciousness
For my purposes here, I am not concerned with explaining consciousness or how it evolved, though this is a fascinating topic in its own right. If you are interested, here is a little insight.
Why is Consciousness so Baffling? | George LakoffConsciousness is subjective
Consciousness is subjective. Although we sense the world through the same five senses (actually far more), we each have a unique mind and sense the world differently.
- We are only consciously aware of what our minds pay attention to.
- We have intent and consider much of what we sense as irrelevant to that intent and filter it out (we are aware of it but ignore it).
- We interpret what we sense in ways that we hardly notice through the lens of experience, education, beliefs, values, morals, culture, and emotions.
Collective Consciousness
Collective consciousness is the set of shared beliefs, values, morals, ideas, attitudes, and knowledge common to a social group or society.
The collective consciousness operates as a unifying force within society and informs our sense of belonging, identity, and behavior.
Higher Consciousness
As used in everyday conversation, higher consciousness is a vague, philosophical, spiritual, or new-age term that puts many people off, as seen in this Wikipedia description.
In looking for a more down-to-earth, pragmatic description of the term, I found this article On Higher Consciousness and an accompanying video (see below) on the School of Life website that says it all for me.
The article points out that higher consciousness has nothing inherently to do with spirituality and can be defined simply in rational and secular terms. Unfortunately, it does not attempt to define the term concisely.
Higher Consciousness | The School of Life
Global Consciousness
The term Global Consciousness is often used as an alternative to an awareness of what’s going on in the world. For example:
Cheap air travel, television and the internet are creating a new global consciousness.
It also has a more sophisticated meaning as a direct correlation between mind and matter on a global scale. But this is not the meaning I am using here.
In this blook, the term has a simple, pragmatic meaning summed up in the two quotations below.
Global consciousness is the capacity and disposition to understand and act upon significant global issues such as sustainability, climate change, human rights, or global governance.
It is the ability and willingness to understand ourselves and others within the broader context of our complex, hyperconnected world.
Adapted from: Global Consciousness – World Studies Extended Essay
Global consciousness is important because an ability to understand, respect, and work well with people from different countries, cultures, and religions is increasingly important for the survival of our global civilization and our collective well-being.
Adapted from: What is Global Awareness and Why Does it Matter?
Three Dimensions of Global Consciousness
The concept of global consciousness encompasses:
Global sensitivity – sensitive to local phenomena and experiences as manifestations of broader developments on the planet.
Global understanding – the capacity to think and act in flexible and informed ways about issues of global and local significance.
Global self – a perception of self as a global actor and member of a local community, a city, a nation and humanity, capable of making a positive contribution to the world.
Adapted from: Global Consciousness – World Studies Extended Essay
Evolution of Global Consciousness
Another term that is broadly synonymous with global consciousness is worldview.
In his book World View Dynamics and The Well-Being of Nations, Richard Barrett talks about the evolution of worldviews.
Until recent times worldviews have been slow to evolve.
The worldview of Clan Awareness began with the arrival of Homo sapiens around 200,000–300,000 years ago and was the dominant worldview until Tribe Awareness emerged around 12,000 years ago.
Tribe Awareness was the dominant worldview for around 6,500 years until State Awareness emerged about 5,500 years ago. State Awareness was the dominant worldview for around 3,700 years until Nation Awareness emerged about 1,800 years ago.
Nation Awareness was the dominant worldview for around 1,300 years until Wealth Awareness emerged about 500 years ago. The worldview of People Awareness began to emerge about 200 years ago and the worldview of Humanity Awareness began to emerge about 60 years ago.
The principal focus of the seven worldviews and the timeline of their emergence are shown in the following table.
The Age of Consciousness
In his book Beyond Knowledge – How technology is driving an age of consciousness, Bill Halal predicts the Age of Consciousness — an age where our collective global consciousness reaches a level where it starts to significantly impact the world for the better.
We are moving into a new period of human consciousness which we don’t yet fully understand.
When we say a new period of human consciousness, we mean that the perception of the world will be different, at least as different as between the age of enlightenment and the medieval period, when the Western world moved from a religious perception of the world to a perception of the world on the basis of reason, slowly. This will be faster.
The Global Consciousness Project
If you Google the term global consciousness, you will find The Global Consciousness Project
This project has nothing to do with global consciousness, as I define it here, but it is worth saying a few words about it.
The Global Consciousness Project is a parapsychology experiment begun in 1998 to detect possible interactions of “global consciousness” with physical systems.
The project monitors a geographically distributed network of hardware random number generators to identify anomalous outputs that correlate with widespread emotional responses to sets of world events or periods of focused attention by large numbers of people.
Credit: Adapted from Wikipedia
Many people, including myself, consider the experimental methodology to be pseudoscience. Brian Dunning shares his views in the article Unconscious Research of Global Consciousness.
Detailed Resources
- Article: Embodied Cognition by Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021)
Posts that link to this post
- What Is Global Consciousness? Consciousness, collective consciousness, higher consciousness, and global consciousness
- There Is Not a Single, Widely Accepted Definition of Spirituality Spirituality need have nothing to do with religion
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